Six Mornings After
by gabrieeella
Summary: Roomies Bonnie and Caroline go on a bender and wake up with two very different guys: Caroline with her no-strings-attached booty call, Damon, and Bonnie with her broody BFF, Stefan, who ended up dragging their drunk asses home. It's all pretty standard Sunday morning fare, 'til a giant snowstorm turns what should be a harmless morning after... into six mornings after. (BD/SC AU)
1. Rude Awakenings

**Six Mornings After**

 _Chapter One: Rude Awakenings_

* * *

"Bonnie."

Silence.

" _Booo-_ nnie."

Deep, easy breathing. Light snoring. A few chirpy birds.

"Bon, it's almost noon."

More silence. A sleepy nose twitch. Some shuffling. The sharp whoosh of curtains being flung open.

"Rise and shine."

The morning sun didn't so much hit her eyes as _bleach the pupils straight off them_. " _Mrrrmph_!" Bonnie groaned, casting a blind hand around for a pillow and smothering it over her face.

"Oh, _noooo_ , you don't," Stefan said, loping over to the bed and plunking down on the edge in a way that jostled her entire body.

"Stefan," she whined, pulling her limbs into a tight fetal position and burrowing deeper into the mattress.

"Bonnie," he replied in the exact same whine _,_ plucking the pillow off her head and tossing it to the side. "You made me promise like twenty times to wake you up before 10—it's quarter to 12."

"Way too many numbers going on in that sentence," she slurred back, and he rolled his eyes.

"Wake up."

"Mm-mm."

"Up and at 'em, tiger."

"Go away."

"Wakey, wakey."

She swatted at the finger that'd begun tapping on her nose, heaving a dark, begrudging sigh before slowly cracking her eyes open. They were green slits in the blinding sunlight. "What are you even doing here?"

Stefan feigned a thoughtful look. "Good question. Well, I was in the middle of a pretty wild Shark Week marathon—"

Bonnie groaned. "You really need to lay off Shark Week."

"—en all of a sudden someone's calling me at 3 AM…" his brow furrowed, "can't quite place… oh, right. Your delight of a roommate."

Bonnie rubbed at her eyes. "Caroline called you?"

"Yeah, off your phone—apparently confused 'Stefan' for a cab company since she literally commanded me to pick you guys up. Something about semi-annual—"

"—roomie's night out," Bonnie finished in a swell of realization, gaze falling into a wince before she dropped her head in her hands. "Oh, God, that was last night."

"What exactly is semi-annual roomie's night out?"

"A tradition from college that needs to _die_."

His mouth quirked. "Well, it seems like if it doesn't, you will—you were wrecked."

"I'm so sorry," she said, parting her fingers to stare up at him through them. "We must've been a nightmare—you didn't have to come get us!"

"When I got there you were climbing into an unmarked black van with no license plate, so." He shot her a smirk. "Think I did."

Bonnie shook her head in her hands. "I'm seriously so, so sorry."

Stefan shrugged. "Don't worry about it."

"No, really, I owe you." His grey-green stare took on a glitter, and her own narrowed. "Don't."

"Shark Week marathon weekend."

"Oh, my _God_."

"Shark Week is quality television."

"You're going to die alone."

"Probably."

Then, "God, I can't believe Caroline called you—how did she even think to try you?"

Stefan rolled his eyes. "I believe her opening line was 'you're the only person I know who'd be home alone on a Saturday night doing nothing'."

Bonnie couldn't help but snort.

" _Hey_."

It bloomed into a full laugh. "I mean, keep up the pity party Discovery Channel binges and she won't be wrong."

He waved the comment off. "Let's go back to profusely thanking me."

"You're right—thank you. Seriously," she said, face bright with the kind of smile that faded in from laughter, and he shrugged, pushing himself up to his feet. "And you didn't have to stay either—I'm sure drunksitting me all night wasn't super fun."

"Nah, you were out cold," he replied, stifling a yawn, "it was just four by the time I finally got you guys here, so I figured I'd crash and head out once you got up. Plus, it was snowing pretty hard."

Her brow furrowed. "Right, that storm was supposed to hit last night. Was it as bad as everyone was saying?

He rolled his eyes. "Is it ever?"

"I swear the Weather Channel gets their kicks from declaring national states of emergency for no reason."

"Gotta get 'em somehow."

"Thanks, though," she added, expression growing guilty again. "For driving in that."

He waved a hand. "No sweat. What are friends for?"

She scrunched her nose. "Getting their hungover friends coffee?"

"Nope."

She sighed as he swiveled around and left the room, flopping back down into the bed and flinging an arm over her forehead. "It was worth a shot."

* * *

Caroline really needed to stop waking up in her bathtub.

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with her bathtub—her bathtub was glorious. She'd fought tooth and nail to get the only apartment in the building with a claw-foot tub. Gold fixtures, deep basin, one of those adorable vintage stoppers with the chain attached—no, her bathtub was a _masterpiece_.

But it was a masterpiece that was killing her neck.

"Ugh," she groaned, slowly pushing herself up the porcelain wall until she'd reached a sitting position. Pain. Pain _everywhere_. Her head, her neck, her back—and a few other places, but that was the good kind, and had much more to do with who she'd brought home last night.

Also a habit she was thinking about kicking soon.

Not that there was anything wrong with Damon—she just worried that if it kept on too long, he might get the wrong idea about how serious they were. Wouldn't be the first time. Guys were so clingy, honestly. Just be a booty call and be happy about it, Jesus Christ.

The door swinging open broke her out of her thoughts, and her mascara-smudged gaze flared with annoyance as it dragged over to the door. And then it rolled. "Morning, loser."

Stefan Salvatore, Bonnie's self-righteous, save-the-whales martyr of a best friend, looked about as thrilled to see her as he measured her from the doorway. "It's noon."

She shot him a breezy smile. "Well then, guess that means it's not _after_ noon, so: morning, loser."

His mouth formed a flat line. "Morning."

She ran a brief glance over his appearance—rumpled flannel, messy hair, sleepless gaze—and a sly, blonde brow slowly arched up. "Stayed the night, hm?"

"Yeah, crazy story—this girl I barely know called me up in the middle of the night to go pick her up, and I ended up getting back here super late."

"She sounds hot."

The quirk of his lips was dry as bone. "She's a lot of things."

She pulled her arms above her head in a fluid, cat-like stretch, bowing her back into a deep arch. "So did you and Bonnie finally hook up or what?"

Stefan's gaze immediately veered skyward at the predictability of the comment. "Yes, Caroline, after fifteen years of being friends, we realized that men and women can't, in fact, be purely platonic, and that Harry and Sally had it right the whole time, and that all we ever needed for this light bulb of sexual awakening to go off was for one of us to be blackout drunk and the other to be deliriously sleep-deprived."

Caroline waved a loose hand around. "I tuned out once your pissy tone made it clear you didn't get any last night."

He sighed. "Can you just let me know when you'll be done with the bathroom? I need to wash up before I head to campus for a—"

"Tuning out again."

He dropped the hand he'd been gesturing with with an exasperated look, and she sighed, slowly pushing herself to her feet. The briefest of changes flickered across his face, and after a split-second, he looked away, causing her to glance down at herself in a flare of curiosity. She immediately snorted—her robe was loose, exposing quite a bit of the skin beneath it.

 _Whoooooa_.

Like he'd never seen a half-naked girl before.

Actually, maybe he hadn't.

Not that he was bad-looking, but God, who could deal with the judgy savior environmental law thing in bed—he'd probably rattle off the scientific name of a different endangered species he was going to save with every thrust. She tightened the knot of her robe and stepped out of the tub, breezing past him with a cool, "It's all yours."

He gave her a humorless smile in response, and she ignored it as she made her way back to her room, where the first thing she was greeted with was a very hot, very sprawled out, very naked man. His jet-black hair was a sex-mussed mess atop her bright blue pillow, and his sleepy, slitted blue gaze cracked open just enough to rake up her frame to her eyes. "Mornin', sunshine."

The gravelly greeting was met with a distracted "morning" as she began stumbling around her room in search of her phone. Her boss didn't really believe in 'weekends', so she could only imagine how much nonsense she was already behind on dealing with—she was usually up by 9 at the latest.

"What would you say," he ventured, slowly rolling up into a sitting position that cut his abdomen into a jagged series of ridges, "to a little naked breakfast?"

"Uh," she began, only half-paying attention as she picked up her dress from last night and looked beneath it: no phone, "I don't really do breakfast, but—" she picked up her jacket to check the pockets, "I think there might be some pancake mix or something downstairs: Bonnie's into all that." She waved a hand around in a dismissive gesture, the fingers of the other wrapping around a smooth, hard surface. Bingo. She immediately fished her phone out, shooting him a tight smile over her shoulder. "Feel free to use whatever you want."

He gave her a sleepy wink. "Will do."

* * *

" _Mmmm."_

Bonnie's grip tightened around her pen.

"Mmm, mmm, _mmmmm._ "

She blinked a few times, trying to focus on the words she was reading.

"Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm, _MMMM_ —"

She set the pen down with a sharp sigh. "Seriously?" The obnoxious chorus continued to filter into the living room from the kitchen, where Caroline's latest boy-toy was whipping up God knows what—using _her stuff_ , by the way, since Caroline never ate breakfast. She shot a stormy glare in his general direction.

Damon wasn't exactly her favorite of Caroline's strays.

The blasting 90s rock was bad enough.

She wasn't about to deal with a bonus track of culinary MMMbop.

"Hey," she called out, pushing the pathology book off her lap and uncurling her legs from the armchair. When nothing but a wailing Kurt Cobain came in response, she forced herself up to her feet and padded over to the kitchen, trying her best to look intimidating in Snoopy slippers, flannel boxers, and a giant BUSM t-shirt.

Turns out it didn't matter, since the sight of a half-naked Damon swigging bourbon with one hand and pumping a spatula to the beat with the other stopped her dead in her tracks, flipping her determined expression into one of exasperated disbelief. Was this dude for real? "Okay, a couple things," she began, and Damon flipped a pancake with a whimsical twirl.

"Mornin', little bird."

That threw her for a second: since when the hell was she little bi—you know what? Whatever. "One: it's barely noon." She waved a hand at the bourbon to clarify her meaning, though her brow promptly furrowed. "And we don't even _have_ bourbon."

"Well," he said, tipping his head back to finish off the bottle before tossing it aside in a loose skitter, "you certainly don't anymore." He waggled his eyebrows at her and she fought back an eye roll.

"Two: are you literally allergic to shirts?"

He smirked as he poured a thick pile of pancake mix on the pan. "Why, you going to cure me, doc?"

"You don't cure allergies," she replied a bit coolly, giving him a pointed once-over. "You avoid them." He seemed thoroughly amused by this response, and it made her skin prickle with irritation. "Third—"

"This is more than a couple of things."

"—I start my Urology rotation tomorrow, which means I have about a thousand different things to memorize, and I really can't concentrate with—"

"Is Urology the one where you deal with dicks all day?"

Her lips pressed together in a thin line. "Actually, that's what I'm doing right now."

"Oooo," he replied, flashing his bright blue stare up to hers. "Prickly."

Her jaw set. "Are you going to keep it down or not?"

His gaze grew sultry. "Keep sassing me in those big, fluffy slippers and it might be hard to keep anything down." She rolled her eyes at the innuendo before spinning on her heel to head back to the living room.

"Turn it down," she said humorlessly as she cleared the door.

"Doctor's orders," he sing-songed from behind her, and she wondered for the hundredth time this month how long 'til Caroline got a new fix. The thought didn't last, however, since a sudden, blood-curling "WHAT" tore through the air like screeching tires on hot asphalt, causing Bonnie's already pounding head to nearly split open.

"Really, Care?" she hissed, snapping a glare toward the hallway just as Stefan emerged from it, phone out and brow furrowed.

"What was that all abo—"

"Have you checked the news?"

Bonnie's brows lifted. "No?"

"We got six feet of snow last night."

Her eyes blew into giant circles. "What?"

"Is this a _joke_?" Caroline snapped as she burst out of her room, rushing down the hall in a tornado of blonde hair. "The MBTA is totally shutdown and my Uber app isn't working—how the hell am I supposed to get to work?" She pushed past Stefan en route to the front door, swinging it open and storming into their hallway to do God knows what.

Bonnie's stare was fixed on Stefan. "I thought you said it wasn't that bad!"

He threw an exasperated hand up. "It wasn't when I got here!"

" _Six_ feet in one night?"

"And more tonight."

"What? How is that possible?"

"I don't know."

The door to the kitchen suddenly swung open, admitting a frowning, spatula-wielding Damon. "There's a chance I'm still drunk," he began, "but you guys live on the second floor, right?"

"And?" Bonnie sighed, in absolutely zero mood to deal with Damon's shit.

He shrugged. "Nothing, really—just wondering why the ground's now magically up to your window."

Her face paled, and she immediately set off toward the living room's old bay window, wrenching the curtains open with a sharp _whoosh_. Sure enough, the snow had accumulated to just below the sill. It looked like they were on the first floor. Jesus Christ, this was a _snowpocalypse._

"I can't get out of the building!" Caroline exclaimed as she burst back into the apartment, causing all heads to turn to her. "The door literally won't move; it's like there's a freaking wall behi—" her voice cut off as her gaze landed on Bonnie, and more specifically, the window behind her. She blinked. "Is that the _snow_?"

Stefan shot her a 'hello?' look. "Did you miss the part where we got six feet?"

"Yeah, but we've gotten six feet before, right?"

His brows flew up. "In one night? Literally never."

She looked at Bonnie for confirmation and she winced, shaking her head.

Caroline scoffed, tossing a frustrated hand up. "Well, then what the hell are we supposed to do?" She looked at Bonnie. Bonnie looked at Stefan. Stefan looked at Caroline. Caroline looked at Stefan.

They all turned to look at Damon, who gave a capricious wave of his spatula.

"Pancakes?"

 **Author's Note:** _It's finally here! For everyone following this story from the movie trailers/tumblr account, hope it lives up to what you had in mind. It's moving a little fast right now, but these four have a TON of time for development as the story goes on (there's only so much you can do under one roof for six days), so hopefully it starts fleshing out more. To anyone who just happens to have stumbled on this, this fic is weird in that it was born out of a couple of AU movie trailers I made for it, so basically, it already has vids and graphics and playlists made for it. The idea seemed to garner some interest, so I decided to go ahead and fic it. If you want to know more, you can find it all on the tumblr (sixmorningsafter is the username - also linked in my author bio). Thanks so much for the read!_


	2. Time to Get Svetlana

**Six Mornings After**

 _Chapter Two: Time to Get Svetlana_

* * *

"…are predicting another three feet of snow between 11 PM and 4 AM EST tonight, leading to a total accumulation of nine feet in 48 hou—"

 _Click_.

"…night's snowfall already shattered the Boston record of 63 inches set in February, 1972, though based on our weather team's reports, it looks like there's going to be a lot more where that came fro—"

 _Click_.

"…city of Boston preparing to declare a state of emergency as it prepares for another night of heavy snowfall, with 72 mph winds bringing about blizzard condi—"

 _Click_.

"…with all roads closed till further notice and the MBTA shut down, Mayor Walsh has asked everyone to remain inside for the time being, citing emergency protocol for—"

 _Click._

The screen went black. Four faces were reflected in the dark glass, a comical collage of furious blonde, anxious brunette, pensive hero hair, and lazily-pancake-chewing vixen. The hollow tick of a clock filled the silence, wryly clucking its tongue at their predicament, until Caroline broke.

"So we're _stuck here_?"

The line was delivered with such victimized melodrama that Bonnie couldn't help but shoot her a flat look from her armchair. "For now."

"You heard them, Bonnie, they said it's getting worse tonight," she snapped, gesturing at the TV. "So if we can't even handle eight feet—"

"Six," Stefan corrected from his perch on the arm of Bonnie's chair, but she blustered right over him.

"—then how the hell are we supposed to handle ten?"

"Nine."

"We're not," Bonnie replied, shoulders lifting into a helpless shrug. "We'll probably be snowed in tomorrow, too, but they can't have the T out of service for more than a few days, so I'm sure we'll be back to normal by Tuesday."

"Yeah, assuming we don't get another three feet tomorrow night and end up at fifteen!"

"Twelve."

Her eyes fell into slits as they cut over to Stefan's. "Can you go save a friggin' manatee or something?"

He feigned a wince. "Too busy saving everyone from your math."

" _I think_ ," Bonnie swooped in, clapping her hands together to redirect their bubbling aggression back to her, "that it's pointless to freak out about things we don't know for sure, so let's focus on what we _do_ know."

"Which is?"

"Well, we're definitely stuck here today, and it's pretty safe to say tomorrow as well, so we need to make sure we cover the basics. Food?"

"I went grocery shopping Friday," Caroline replied, though her lip promptly curled in annoyance. "Didn't realize it was for _four_ people, but…"

"I can cover the next week," Bonnie offered in compromise, and Stefan raised two fingers.

"I'll help."

Caroline rolled her eyes. "No, it's fine, whatever—it's just two days."

"We'll figure it out," Bonnie assured her, eager to skip the drama and keep moving. "Next up: water."

"What about it?"

"You need to plan for the pipes freezing," Stefan supplied, and Caroline's stare grew instantly annoyed at the know-it-all quality of his voice. "We're hitting seven degrees tonight with 75 mph winds; that's an insane wind chi—"

"So what do we do? Round up some bottles?" she cut in, stare fixed on Bonnie, and Stefan's lips twitched humorlessly at the interruption.

"Yeah, and maybe a few pitchers—we also have a ton of mason jars, if you think we'll need more." She directed the last part at Stefan, who nodded.

"I'll check it out."

"Great. Now—"

"Sleeping arrangements," a new voice interjected, and everyone turned to look at Damon, who was currently licking the syrup off his fork. Bonnie's eyes immediately felt the urge to roll—was this dude just in a constant state of filming a porn intro?

"What about them?"

His stare slid up to Bonnie's. "Well, from what I can tell, there are four people and two beds. I vote we get creative."

"Cool—I vote we do the same thing we did last night," she countered dismissively, and Damon shrugged, shooting a 'what-can-you-do' glance at Caroline. She smirked back, and Bonnie briefly noted how entirely unattached to each other they both were. Like, she knew Caroline well enough to expect it from her—or at least, expect it from post-Matt Caroline—but she hadn't realized Damon shared her breezy, nonconformist streak. Honestly, most of Caroline's flings ended in the guy getting possessive and Caroline dropping them like they were hot. This, though?

This was like two Carolines.

She wasn't entirely sure what to make of it.

"Quick note about the food situation," Stefan piped up, "there's a really solid chance you might lose power at some point with all the wind, so if you have a cooler or something, I'd have it ready to fill up and put out on the fire escape."

Bonnie turned to Caroline. "You have that small one, right?"

"Svetlana?" she said, and Stefan's brows ticked upward. "That's for my Svedka."

Bonnie sighed. "Okay, well, given the situation, could Svetlana maybe…" she waved an exasperated hand around, "multi-task?"

Caroline sank back into her seat with a cool shrug. "I guess."

"Great."

"Second note," Stefan said, shaking off his inability to believe someone would name a cooler, "what kind of stove do you have?"

Bonnie and Caroline both looked at each other. "Uh…" Bonnie ventured.

"The cooking kind," Caroline offered with an implied 'obviously'.

"Gas." Stefan turned to look at Damon, who gave the bit of pancake speared onto his fork a brief wave in explanation of how he knew.

"Great, then we don't have to worry about not being able to cook."

Caroline snorted, eyes meeting Bonnie's. "Except for the part where we don't know how."

Bonnie winced. "Sad, but true. Stefan?"

"Sure—least I can do."

Caroline's brows took on a sardonic arch. "You cook?"

"You didn't know that?" Bonnie said, whirling around to meet her gaze. "I swear he's cooked here before—he's _amaaaaazing_."

Stefan's mouth quirked at the corners. "Exaggeration."

"Oh _, shut_ up—that freaking gorgonzola cream you make?" Bonnie pressed on, turning a bright grin up to him. "If I wake up one day and finally realize what an idiot you are I'll pretend to be your friend _purely_ for that sauce."

He pressed a hand to his heart. "That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

Bonnie smiled sadly. "And it's the nicest anyone ever _will_ say."

"Unkind."

"I'm delightful."

"Alright, so Stefan's our Martha Stewart," Caroline said, making an impatient rolling motion with her hand, "what's next?"

"How about," Damon said, leaning forward to set his plate on the coffee table, "what the hell we're supposed to do all day?" He eased back into the couch with a languid air, crossing his arms behind his head and swooping his feet up on the table beside his plate. "Not that the food chat isn't exciting."

"I mean, I have to study," Bonnie said, glancing around at everyone. "I don't know what you all have planned…"

"Work," Caroline said, waving her phone.

"Ideally, I'd get a jump on this depo I have to prep," Stefan said, scratching the back of his head, "but I'd need a laptop."

Bonnie glanced at Caroline. "Care?"

She shrugged. "Whatever."

"Caroline has an extra laptop—pretty sure 'whatever' means you can use it."

He shot her an awkward nod. "Great—thanks."

"Whatever," came the same flat reply.

Bonnie glanced at Damon. "Uh, there's TV, movies, books, I have a kindle you can use if you want," she offered, casting around for things to do as Damon stared back at her blankly. "I have knitting needles, if you're… you know, into that…"

More staring.

" _Oh_ , if you like puzzles, I have this giant one of a blown-up uterus from my OB/GYN rota—"

"I have stuff for jello shots—make them so we can get drunk and play poker later."

" _Done_ ," he told Caroline, clapping his hands and hopping to his feet to head over to the kitchen.

Bonnie's stare darkened. Those two drunkenly playing poker while stuck inside a tiny apartment mid-blizzard sounded like a straight up disaster. Nonetheless, Damon wasn't her responsibility, so as Caroline would say: whatever.

"'Kay, I'm going to get some studying done—Stefan, you good?"

"Yeah, just going to grab the laptop and pound out some work."

"My room's open if you need some quiet, but _no whiney_ _alt rock_."

Stefan scoffed. "Radiohead isn't _whi—_ "

"'I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo, I don't belong here?'" she cited, and he threw his hands up.

"That's a great song!"

"Use my headphones," she threw over her shoulder as she disappeared into her room, and he sighed.

"No taste." He turned to shoot the nearest person a commiserating look of disappointment, but promptly realized that person was Caroline. Well. So much for that. "So—"

"Follow me," she all but yawned, traipsing over to her room with a bored air that always managed to annoy him. It just always seemed so artificial, so affected, like she needed everyone to think she couldn't be bothered with caring about anything because the world was just so uninteresting. Cool points mattered more than actually contributing something, apparently.

The first thing he noticed about her room was that it was a lot neater than he'd expected it to be. Everything smelled like lavender, her clothes from last night were tidily folded onto a bright blue armchair, her linen bed was immaculately made, and her desk was an organized network of floral boxes with gold letterpress labels like 'stationary', 'research', and 'ad campaigns'.

It was surprising.

He'd always assumed Caroline was a wreck, like her domestic habits matched her personality: loud, careless, unconcerned with boundaries. And yet, even after a bender that had her screeching a Spice Girls/Nirvana mash-up for half the car ride home last night, her room was pristine.

Weird.

"It's in here," she said, disappearing into her closet and leaving him awkwardly standing in the doorway. He rocked a bit on his heels, hands digging into his pockets as he waited, though after a solid minute of rustling went by, he heard a muffled thud and a hiss of curses.

His brow furrowed. "Need help?"

"Grab a chair!" she shouted back, and he switched into action, grabbing the chair from her desk with one hand and hauling it over to the closet. His brows ticked up as he swung the door all the way open _—_ who the hell had a walk-in closet in the North End?

"Killer storage space," he said with a whistle, eyes flitting over the rows upon rows of shoes and purses and flattening sardonically. Guess the surprises were over.

"Chair," she replied, holding out an impatient hand. He handed it to her and she plunked it down, climbing on top of it and stretching to try and reach something on the high, wrap-around shelf. Instinctively, his gaze flitted down her frame, sweeping from the tumble of loose blonde hair trailing down her back to the inverted parentheses of her waist, the stripe of bare skin at the base of her back from where he white turtleneck had ridden up, the feminine flare of her hips in the black jeans she had on, and the long, loping legs that gave way to bare feet that were currently balancing on their toes.

The observation didn't yield anything particularly new. Caroline was all brass and sex appeal—he'd picked up on that from the moment he'd met her. Didn't mean it appealed to him in particular, but he wasn't enough of an idiot to pretend she wasn't attractive. Physically, anyway.

Everything else, well.

A sharp exhalation broke the silence. "Finally," she hissed, pulling an aqua blue laptop case out from behind a shoebox and reaching behind her to blindly hand it to him. He took it with a nod of thanks and glanced down at it, arching a brief brow at the case. It had a giant picture of The Little Mermaid on it.

His lips twitched slightly. "Big Ariel fan, huh?"

She threw a puzzled glance over her shoulder as she climbed off the chair. "Oh, that. Not really, pretty sure it was just on sale. That laptop's super old, by the way—might be kind of slow."

Stefan shrugged. "No worries, I just need a word processor and internet access."

"Exciting," she replied as she pushed past him, making her way to the door, and without really thinking, his mouth parted.

"You _really_ don't like me, do you?"

She stopped about a foot past him, dropping her hand from the doorknob and turning to face him. He wasn't sure what made him ask: they'd never acknowledged their friction before. Hell, they'd never even really been able to trace it back to any particular origin, likely because analyzing their relationship would imply that they even had one, and neither really gave the other enough importance in their life to define it that much.

But something about standing in her closet with just her, no Bonnie to buffer the interaction or act as the glue between two things that would normally never combine, suddenly made them two people with a unique, weird as hell dynamic of their own. The sudden awareness of it, of him and Caroline as a distinct combination of two people, made him want to understand it better.

"It's not that I don't like _you_ ," she began, taking a slow step forward and cocking her head to the side in sharp appraisal. He couldn't help but raise his brows at the surprising start.

"Okay."

"It's that I don't like _yous_."

They immediately dove down into a furrow—confusing yet hostile. There's the Caroline he knew. "What does that even mean?"

She shrugged, crossing her arms against her chest. "It means that I've met a lot of yous, Stefan. In school, in bars, at work. The 'good guy' who's super humble, super sensitive, hates drama, never cares for material things, has obscure music taste, and wakes up every morning wanting to _make a difference._ " She gave her fist a sarcastic pump, and he merely stared at her, grey-green eyes on cool blue.

"And at this point, as yous always do, you're probably wondering, 'how are any of those bad things?'" Part of him was annoyed that she was right, but the larger part was wondering how she could possibly explain hating people just because they actually cared about things. "And the answer's that they're not bad things." Her stare narrowed as her lips lifted into a frosty smile. "But they're also not true things. That's just what yous believe, because _yous,_ " she eased forward, tapping a finger on his chest, "aren't actually 'the good guy'—you're the self-righteous guy. You're not humble, you want to be _known_ as humble—I mean you literally think you're going to change the world, for crying out loud."

His frowned deepened at her chuckle, mouth parting to reply but she pressed onward.

"Yous hate drama because you only care about yourselves, and listening to other people's problems bore you. That's why when _you_ have problems, suddenly you're 'sensitive' and need to talk about them. Yous don't care about material things because it makes you feel superior to people that do. Same goes for your weirdo music taste, I mean, do you even have a top 40s song on your iPod?"

He blinked. "Sure I do."

She snorted in obvious skepticism. "Look, bottom line, I know you, buddy," she drawled, taking a final step toward him so that her upturned nose was only a few inches from his, sending the intimacy of the conversation sky-rocketing. "Hell, I _dated_ you," she added with a slight laugh that struck his chin in a brush of warmth, "for five years, actually, and the thing is, people like you spend so much time thinking you're 'individuals' and above the petty fray of social politics and what 'society wants you to be' and blah blah _blah,"_ she waved a flippant hand around before letting it drop into a light, patronizing pat on his chest, _"_ that you miss the _hilarious_ irony of that fact that all your time is spent fixated on judging everyone else for not being the way _you_ want them to be."

She gave him a cool, light, blithe little smile.

"And that, Stefan, is why I don't like yous."

He merely stared at her.

She stared right back, her eyes a pale, prickly blue—sharper than he'd ever given them credit for—and every last line of her face radiated quiet conviction. As far as she was concerned, she had him read. No margin of error, no space for nuance: he was a 'you' and yous were everywhere she'd seen it all before.

He honestly couldn't even be pissed off because it was so outrageous.

" _I_ think," he began, dropping his stare briefly—it snagged on the smug purse of her mouth, "that I learned a lot more about you from that speech than I did about me."

Her head slowly lolled to the side. "And _I_ think," she murmured, dropping her hand from his chest to draw in even closer, "that that is a _textbook_ you thing to say."

He returned her breezy smile with one of his own. "You don't know me, Caroline."

She shrugged, briefly running her gaze over his face. "Well, we're stuck here for two days, so." She waggled her brows. "Feel free to prove me wrong." And with that, she swiveled around and sauntered through the doorway, leaving him standing in the closet with her laptop in hand.

A faint trace of lavender lingered behind.

Well.

That was illuminating.

And literally the second the thought finished crossing his mind, the power went out.

A muffled groan sounded from the living room, mixing with the faint "Are you _kidding_ me?" from Bonnie's room.

Stefan merely sighed, setting the now pointless laptop down on a shelf and making his way back to the living room. Caroline was scowling at the ceiling lamp, Damon was propped against the kitchen doorframe, and Bonnie was cross-armed and glowery outside of her door.

"What now?" Bonnie sighed, directing the question at Stefan in a tired voice, and he simply shrugged, switching his stare over to Caroline.

"Time for Svetlana to meet her new day job."

 **A/N:** _Wooo, chapter two! Things are still getting developed, but I wanted to drop a line about two things. One: I know this chapter's a little more SC heavy than BD, and in general, this story's going to switch off with them, so next chapter's probably going to be a little BD heavy, and then some chapters will be more ensembly, some more balanced, etc. There's no one main couple. Second note: I know Caroline's whole read of Stefan might seem strange, but in this AU, she dated Matt for four years and obviously the vampire storyline never happened, so I imagined that without all the early-dating magic around or supernatural growth, that relationship went on for a while and ended in resentment, given Matt's tendency to seem like he was into Caroline despite who she was instead of because of it. It'll be talked about more later, but just a head's up. Stay tuned for no electricity shenanigans soon!_


	3. Easy Peasy

_A/N: Wanted to open with a couple of things! 1. Just to clear this up, Damon and Stefan aren't brothers in this fic - they've never met before. 2. This chapter's a little on the NSFW-side… you've been warned ;) 3. It's a little more Bamon-centric than the last, and meant to reveal a bit more about Damon. Again, though, this is fundamentally an ensemble so it should hopefully always balance out! 4. I knew getting into this fic that there would inevitably be some moments of pure outrageousness - I think this chapter has your first glimpse of that. I'm so sorry. I don't even know what happened. In any case, Gabi out._

* * *

 **Six Mornings After**

 _Chapter Three: Easy Peasy_

* * *

"…know it's here _somewhere_ ," Bonnie muttered, crouched down on the floor of the mostly dark kitchen, rummaging through their mess of a hardware drawer for their stash of batteries. Stefan was in the living room tinkering with the space heater, Caroline was lighting candles around the darker spots of the apartment, and Damon was sifting through their electricity-less fridge for things that needed to be transferred to Svetlana.

She pulled out an unmarked white box and lifted the lid.

Thumbtacks.

 _Now_ she finds them. When she was putting up all her physiology diagrams? Nowhere to be found.

She sighed, tossing the box back in the dark drawer with an impatient rattle and shoving the whole thing shut. "Take _five_ ," she grumbled, pushing her slight frame up to her feet and opening the cupboard hanging over the sink.

"Would you consider whipped cream essential?"

Bonnie's face crumpled as she attempted to reach back into cupboard. "Would you?"

"In certain contexts."

She'd walked right into that one. "Throw it in if there's room at the end, otherwise get rid of it."

"What about this Hershey's syr—"

"Keep it," she replied immediately, and his stare veered over to hers, languorously amused. "Don't be gross." She grimaced as she lifted onto her tiptoes, body straining as her fingers brushed the edge of the box. "I just like hot chocolate."

He dragged his gaze over her outstretched frame in a luxuriating once-over. "So do I."

Bonnie snorted. "'Cause when I said 'don't be gross', what I _really_ meant was throw in some objectification with a fun splash of racial fetishization." A beat of silence passed, and her lips pursed. "You didn't get a word of that."

He lifted a bottle of something bright green to peer at it in the faint light filtering through the window. "Something about fetishes—the hell is this?"

She shot him a dry glance and he gave the glass bottle an indicative wiggle, pulling her face into a furrow. "Kombucha?"

His brows raised a fraction. "Did you just hex me?"

"Kombucha's a type of tea," she said with an eye roll, and he began twisting the cap off.

"You do give me a bit of a witchy vibe, what with all the hostility and muttering."

"Muttering?"

"Yeah, you're always mumbling out scientific-sounding shit as you read."

"Weird, it's almost like I'm studying medicine."

"I would argue medicine is a form of magic."

"Poetic."

The sound of him violently spitting something out was his response, and her gaze snapped down to the sight of him staring at the Kombucha in horror.

"What the _fuck_?"

She couldn't help her snort.

"People _drink_ this?"

"Caroline drinks it every day."

"This is a chemical weapon."

"It's really healthy."

"This is a mix of battery acid—"

"Lots of people swear by it."

"—and the tears of dying children."

Bonnie shrugged. "Maybe next time you can ask her before you help yourself to whatever and she'll give you a warni— _damn_ it," she hissed, whipping her hand down from the cupboard and dropping back onto her heels to inspect it. Paper cut.

Damon set down the bottle with a wry look. "What are you looking for again?"

"Batteries for the space heater," she muttered, shaking her hand out and glaring up at the cupboard.

"You seem a little out of your height league."

"If that's your mildly insulting way of offering to help, be my guest."

She heard the shuffle of him getting to his feet, and after a few moments, the heat of him easing up behind her. His voice was a shockingly close rumble in her ear. "I do love a good damsel in distress."

" _Wow_ , okay, and I love boundaries," she replied, whirling around and taking a quick step to the side. The corner of his mouth curled upward, face draped in shadows as it loomed a solid foot above hers.

"Shame."

Her stare tapered, thinned by a mixture of scrutiny and annoyance. What was it with this guy? Innuendo this, innuendo that—was even possible to think about sex that much? "What is this?" He arched a brow, and she gestured at him with a loose hand. "This thing you do, the whole sex-crazed act. Defense mechanism, overcompensation, what?"

His stare glittered with amusement. "Does sex really make you that uncomfortable?"

"Not in the slightest, but someone hitting on literally anything that moves does strike me as a _little_ odd."

"Hey, that's not fair," he said, mouth tugging into a childish pout. "I haven't hit on Stefan."

Bonnie scoffed. "Not yet."

The mockery in his expression shifted into curiosity. "Speaking of Stefan," he mused, stepping forward to reach up into the cabinet, "what's the deal with you two? Nerds-with-benefits?"

Her eyes narrowed on his profile. "Best friends, actually. Not that I'd imagine you have many of those."

"I happen to be _very_ friendly." He illustrated this point by extracting the box of supplies with ease and brandishing it front of her. She reached up to take it and he thrust his arm up at the last second, holding it impossibly high over his head. "Ah, _ah_ ," he tsked, and Bonnie's stare flattened as he took what was probably supposed to be a 'seductive' step closer. "What do I get?"

She scoffed at the question. "The same thing I get: a space heater that works." He took a moment to consider this, and she shrugged. "I mean, if you think standing around like a slutty Statue of Liberty and freezing to death is a better option, go for it."

He sighed, dropping his arm and holding the box out. "You're no fun."

"Neither is hypothermia."

She grabbed the box and swiveled around, and he watched her waltz off with a glint in his gaze.

Caroline's roommate was no-nonsense as _hell_.

He had to give her props for taking literally none of his shit, though. Not today, not a week ago—not since he'd first come over, really. And it wasn't in that dramatic, uptight way he was used to people hating him in—it was level. Logical. Subtle in its sassiness. He hadn't really given a shit before, but now that he had nothing else to do?

Definitely starting to look like a bottomless source of entertainment.

Well…

He cocked his head to the side, dragging his stare to the swaying curve of her hips just as she cleared the doorway.

Maybe bottomless was the wrong word.

A whirl of blonde swept into the kitchen. "Is there anything more useless than matches that don't light up, like they have _one_ job," Caroline snapped, flinging what must've been a defunct matchbox onto the kitchen table and making a beeline for the drawer Bonnie'd been rummaging through earlier.

Damon smirked as she all but ripped it open. "Someone's fiery."

Caroline glanced up suddenly, as if remembering something. "Oh, _right_ , on that note—we're not having sex tonight."

He shrugged. "'Kay."

"Great," she replied, attention already having snapped back to finding new matches. His lips quirked briefly—he'd always liked that about Caroline, how straight-forward she was about what she wanted and what she didn't. He couldn't be sure what she was like in other contexts, but with him, she was clear as day: if she wanted him, she was in his lap, mouth on his ear, murmuring all of the things she wanted him to do to her; if she didn't, it was a raised palm and a 'no thanks'.

It didn't seem to be part of some game, either, like it was with some people. They'd pretend to be fine with 'no stings attached' because they thought they could turn him around and then blew up when they realized love wasn't something he dealt in. Caroline, though, didn't seem to be playing. She was straight up, like him, and he liked that.

"Actually, I was thinking we should stop hooking up in general."

Okay, maybe he didn't _love_ it.

"You _do_ realize," he began, letting his head fall to the side in thought, "that you're coming to this conclusion two hours after we find out we're going to be stuck under the same roof with nothing to do for the next 48 hours."

"Yep," she said, taking out a tray of odds and ends and setting it on the counter.

"Just checking."

She sighed as she rifled through the tray's contents. "Look, people tend to get all," she lifted a screwdriver and absently waved it around, "bond-y in these kinds of situations, and if we're hooking up, the lines of what this is could get blurred and I don't want to deal with that."

Despite the fact that he knew there was zero percent chance of that happening on his end, he merely shrugged. "Whatever you say, Goldilocks."

She shot him a brief smile, though her features promptly contorted in a wild look. "A- _ha_!" she cried, snatching a lighter up in victory. "I _knew_ we had one!"

"But we're still doing poker and jello shots."

She scoffed, tossing her hair over her shoulder to stare at him. " _Obviously_."

His hands shot up in defense. "Hey, I don't know what Nun Caroline's down for."

She smirked. "Nun Caroline's down for destroying you at poker."

"Just not destroying me in bed."

"Nope." Her stare took on a playful glint. "Which isn't to say she _couldn't_ , just. You know. Won't."

He sighed. "Nun Caroline's the worst."

She laughed just as a throat cleared, causing both of their heads to pivot toward the door to the living room. Stefan gave a stiff wave with one hand, the other lodged into his pocket. "I don't mean to interrupt your, uh…" he cast around for a word, hand awkwardly suspended in the air, and Caroline's stare grew pointed.

"Our what?"

He sighed, dropping his hand. "Whatever—look, this is kind of a shot in the dark, but are either of you good with circuits?"

She cocked her head to the side in a frosty look. "Why would that be a shot in the dark?"

He frowned, shoulder lifting briefly. "I don't know, don't you work in like fashion or something?"

Her brow arched. "And that means I can't know anything about circuits?"

His eyes tapered in confusion, mouth parting in search of how to navigate an answer. "I mean… do you?"

She held his stare for a long, cutting moment before shrugging. "No." And without waiting for a response, she plucked the lighter up and left the kitchen, breezing past him with an air so distinctly feline he could practically see a tail flicking behind her.

He stared at the door for a beat before switching his blank gaze over to Damon. "Do you understand anything she does?"

Damon shrugged, reaching over for a bag of chips that'd been abandoned on the counter and popping it open. "Sure."

Stefan gestured behind himself. "Then what was that?"

"Pretty sure that was her not liking you." Damon plucked a chip out and popped into his mouth, immediately grimacing at the flavor. "What the—" he lifted the bag up to read the label. " _Veggie Sticks_? Who the fuck eats this?"

"Honestly, I don't even know what I did to her."

"Everything in this kitchen is poison."

"Has she ever said anything to you?"

Damon popped another veggie stick into his mouth. "She rants about you a lot, actually."

"What?"

"Yeah—whole monologues, bro," he said, waving a be-veggiesticked hand, and Stefan's eyes narrowed in confusion. "They usually come right after we talk about our hopes and dreams _buuuut_ before we gush about the latest Scandal episode."

His stare flattened, and Damon shot him an insouciant smirk before shoving another veggie stick in his mouth. "What's the big deal—you don't like her either, right?"

Stefan hesitated at the absoluteness of the question. "She's... not exactly my favorite person."

"Right, which is PC for hating someone, so who cares?"

He sighed, forcing himself to cast off his stubborn need to understand the situation. "You're right. Besides, none of this is going to matter when we all freeze to death 'cause no one can get the space heater to work."

"Oh, right—I can do that."

His stare shot up. "What?"

"I'm great with electrical stuff."

Stefan eyed him blankly. "Is that another joke, or—"

Damon chuckled. "Yeah."

Stefan sighed, pushing a hand through his hair as Damon fished a set of pliers and some electrical tape out of the drawer and set off for the living room. He glanced up with a puzzled look as Damon waltzed past. "What are you—"

"Double-joke: I actually am great with electrical stuff."

Damon ignored the thoroughly bemused look hitting the back of his head as he wandered over to the middle of the living room, where a stubborn little gaggle of limbs was fighting a losing battle against a big bad space heater. He clucked his tongue. "C'mon, witchy, you know what I said about damsels in distress."

Her eyes flashed up to the ceiling in shot of annoyance.

"Now you're just teasing me."

"Did you finish putting the stuff in the cooler?"

He rolled his eyes at the terse tone. "Relax, kid, your chocolate syrup can survive a few more minutes of room temperature."

"I'll _relax_ when I know everyone's doing what they're supposed to be doing instead of distracting the people that are, _kid_."

His brows flew up in vaguely amused surprise. "Keep a safe distance, folks, she bites."

She shook her head. "It's not funny. If I don't get this fixed we're—"

"—going to have to spend the night all pressed up against each other." He smiled innocently. "Body heat and whatnot. Shame—almost makes me not want to do this."

She frowned. "Do wha—hold o— _what_ are you—" she stumbled back a bit as he plunked down next to her whirled the space heater around, positioning it so that the back was to him.

"First of all," he said, tapping a finger against a large, screwed-shut compartment as he glanced around the floor for something, "this is where you want to be looking."

Bonnie's gaze switched between him and the heater in disbelief. " _You_ know how to fix this."

He stare lit with a salacious flash. "I've got a thing for portable radiation heaters."

"Aaaand the over-sexualization extends to objects, I see."

"I live an equal opportunity life—Phillip's." She frowned as he thrust a hand out without looking. He waited a beat before shaking it impatiently. "Come on, little bird, today."

"Phillip's as is in—"

"Phillip's head screwdriver, keep up."

She rolled her eyes as he snapped his fingers, grabbing the screwdriver and handing it to him. He leaned forward and swiftly unscrewed the lid open, and she noticed how his hands moved with a second-nature ease as he settled into the repair, fiddling with what looked to Bonnie like an indecipherable mess of wire. Curiosity began to brighten her gaze—Damon was the _last_ person she would've pegged as handy. He was just... too glitzy. Too glossy. Every time Caroline brought him over, he was in the standard Financial District suit-and-tie fare, and it didn't exactly scream 'knows how to get his hands dirty'. Even when he poured out of her room in the mornings in a total state of disaster—hair a mess, Oxford undone, gaze a sly, sleepy blue—something about it still managed to scream 'Calvin Klein ad'.

Hell, even right now, sprawled out in an old pair of sweats Caroline had from college and a ratty t-shirt, he looked weirdly elegant.

Made the whole handyman thing a little hard to reconcile.

"Where'd you learn all this?" she ventured after a silent stretch of observation, and he squinted at something.

"Space heater school."

Another thing she was starting to notice: he never gave straight answers to anything. Whimsical this, flippant that. At least to her, anyway.

She was surprised when he elaborated. "Dad was kind of a mechanic—I picked up a few things."

Her ears hinged on the word 'was', trained to look for little clues like that after months of taking patient histories, and the tidbit stored itself into the brand new 'Damon' file in her head. "And your mom?"

He snorted. "Is this an interview?"

"Conversation, actually."

"Pretty sure the 'co' in conversation means that two people are equal participants."

She shrugged. "No one's stopping you from asking me stuff."

"What's the most orgasms you've had in one night?"

"Three."

The immediacy of the answer caught him slightly off-guard, and his hands paused, stare switching over to hers. The question had been intended to shake her a bit, to trigger the usual defense mechanisms uptight girls like her tended to have, but the stare that met his was a shrewd, steady green.

It took him a second to switch back into neutral. "I'd be happy to double that."

"What's your mom do?"

His brows ticked upward, vaguely irritated. "I'm not done with my questions."

"Fine—go."

He dropped his hands from the heater, twisting around to face her more directly. She really wanted to play this game?

"Dirtiest place you've ever given a blowjob."

"Anatomy Lab."

"Ever tasted your own cum?"

"No."

"Most fingers you've ever had inside you."

"Three."

"Screamer or moaner?"

"Scratcher."

His brows ticked up at that response, giving her just enough time to swoop in with quick, even-worded, "What does your mom do?"

He merely stared at her for a beat. She took the opportunity to stare back, curious about the brief flickers of… _something_ she was getting out of him. She couldn't be sure what, exactly, but it almost felt like she was seeing small snaps of him out-of-character. Tiny glimpses of a boundary beneath what seemed like boundless flippancy.

After a few seconds, though, the levity was back. "I don't know," he said, shoulders easing into a shrug.

She frowned. "You don't _know_?"

"Nope," he said, resuming his space-heater-tinkering, and for a moment, she debated whether or not to ask why. Then she thought about the 'was' he'd used for talking about his dad, and decided maybe she was wading into more than she was bargaining for.

"Fine."

Damon snorted, stare trained on the wires. "I make you tell me how many fingers you've had inside you and you take an 'I don't know' for an answer? Gotta step up your game, witchy."

She shrugged, leaning back onto her palms in a casual stretch. "Maybe. _Or_ maybe in the process of trying to throw me off with super pointless sex questions, you didn't actually learn anything about me whereas I learned just how badly you don't want to talk about your mom."

He tugged on a red wire and the space heater suddenly sputtered to life, effectively cutting off the conversation and letting him get away with no answer. He snapped the lid back on and shot her a flinty smirk. "You're welcome." She rolled her eyes at the pivot but welcomed the relief of knowing they weren't actually going to freeze to death—honestly, she'd take that over Real World: Damon anyway.

"Hey, look at that—nice job, man," Stefan said, sidling out of the kitchen and propping himself against the doorframe. "No offense, but I didn't take you for the handy type."

"His dad was a mechanic," Bonnie supplied a bit smugly, as if to prove who won their little interrogation war, and Damon smiled blithely.

"And Bonnie's a scratcher with a three-orgasm max."

Stefan blinked, lips parting in an 'uh' that was cut-off by a unimpressed, "That's it?" Caroline's expression was skeptical as she swept out of her room, lighter in hand and brow arched at Bonnie. "Three _max_?"

Bonnie sighed. "Great."

Damon's shoulders gave an easy shrug. "I offered to double it."

"You should take him up on that, he's good for it."

"I swear this conversation started off normal," Stefan observed, more to himself than anything, and Caroline scoffed.

"Because sex is _so_ abnormal and you've never had it."

His jaw ticced in irritation. "Weirdly enough, I was referring to knowing hyper-specific details about my best friend's sex life and not sex in general, but go ahead and take it in whatever pre-determined way you're set on taking it."

Caroline's brows shot up, unexpected laugh bubbling up her throat. "Look who grew claws."

"Maybe he's a scratcher, too," Damon tossed out, shooting Bonnie a wink that she met with a frosty smile.

"Maybe your mom's a scratcher. Or maybe not. Who knows?"

" _Whoaaaa_ , below the belt." His eyes flashed. "Right where I like it."

"What makes you think I care enough to have a pre-determined way of seeing you?" Caroline snorted, glancing over at Stefan, and he tossed a hand up.

"I don't know, Caroline, maybe the fact that you literally spelled it out an hour ago with your little 'yous' rap."

"Wow, the whole point of that speech was that you're _not_ special, but of course this is what you got out of it."

"How is that at _all_ what I'm saying?"

"How is it _not_?"

"Still think my questions were pointless, Anatomy Lab?" Damon drawled, voice blending into the intensifying duet, and Bonnie snorted.

"Oh, you mean the ones predicated on the idea that I'm somehow embarrassed by sex, which clearly I'm not?"

"That blush you're rockin' begs to differ."

"I'm black—nice try."

"I haven't even _begun_ to try."

The four voices started blurring into each other, slowly rising in a cacophony of friction and dissonance and that spiraled louder and louder, pulling them all in with a magnetic sort of charge until suddenly, without warning, it was all out pandemonium.

"— _no_ idea what the hell your problem with me is—"

"—hilarious that you think this act of yours has _anyone_ fooled—"

"—only problem is that you think I care enough to have a problem with you—"

"—person acting here is obviously you—"

"—really going to pretend this isn't targeted—"

"— _why would I target you_ —"

"—wasn't my idea to play therapist—"

"—literally _two_ questions is 'playing therapist' now—"

"—been doing this since I _met_ you, Caroline—"

"—been a self-righteous pseudo 'nice guy' since I met _yo—"_

Light burst into the apartment in a sudden flood, startling them all into a brief, blessed moment of silence. The weather channel flickered back onto the TV screen, the volume reduced to a low chatter that blended with the whir of appliances coming back to life throughout the apartment, and all of them looked around in various states of surprise.

Eventually, Caroline broke the silence. "Did I seriously just light sixteen thousand candles for no reason?"

Bonnie saw Stefan's mouth part in instinctive response and jumped in before he could. "Okay, so." She clapped her hands a bit awkwardly. "Power's back. Yaaaaaay." She waved a limp wrist in celebration, and Stefan squinted at her in confusion. "Maybe we should all just… do our own thing for a bit, you know. Cool off. Not sure fighting four hours into a 48 hour situations is the best idea."

It took some wrangling and a few near fire starts, but eventually, everyone retreated to their own spaces—Damon found some Die Hard marathon on TV, Stefan was half-watching, half-case-prepping on the armchair, Caroline had disappeared into her room to get some work done, and Bonnie was knee-deep in her Urology book, bed drowning in a sea of diagrams and scribbled notes. It turned out to be a great strategy: day passed to night in relative peace, and honestly, after the rocky start, it was the first indication Bonnie had that maybe this two day hostage situation wouldn't be that terrible.

Everyone just had to lie low stay out of each other's way for one more day.

24 hours.

Easy-peasy.

…

Or at least, that's what she thought, until a violent series of explosions had her rocketing awake at 3 AM.

 _POW. POW PA-POW POW. POW._

She shot up like a banshee, jolting out of her deep, death-like hangover sleep in a state of total disorientation.

 _PA-POW POW PAPAPAPAPOW. CRASH. BANG._

What the everloving _hell_ were they being invaded by _North Korea_?

POW POW PA-POW POWOWOWOWOW. CRASH.

"WHAT THE HELL?" a strangled voice cried from the next room, and somewhere in her dazed head, she recognized it as Caroline's. The smell of smoke and something vaguely sulfuric began filling the air, mixing in with another round of whip-like cracks, and the combination was finally enough to snap Bonnie out of her stupor and get her to the door, which she swung-open with a frantic, wild-eyed look.

All she saw was smoke.

Sheets of it, plumes of it, wafting through their otherwise dark living room in waves. Her panicked gaze swung around in search of a source—the fireplace, the heater, _anything_ —but before she could find anything, an ear-splitting _crack_ went off about a foot away from her, sparking a sharp yellow in the inky darkness. She yelped, entire body leaping in the air, and that's when she heard it.

Muffled, strangled—undoubtedly smothered under two tightly layered hands.

A giggle.

Distantly, she heard Caroline's door swing open, but before the blonde could even say anything Bonnie lurched forward and flipped on the light switch.

To be honest, she wasn't entirely sure was she was expecting.

But she could say, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that it sure as _hell_ wasn't Damon standing stock-still behind a floor lamp, body rigid and unmoving like maybe if he was still enough she wouldn't see the _90% of him that wasn't hidden by a two-inch-thick rod_ , and Stefan half-shoved underneath their shag rug like it was some sort of boa constrictor in the process of swallowing him whole.

Well, that, and a bunch of detonated firecrackers.

"Are. You. _Fucking. Kidding. Me_."

Caroline's hiss was so sharply deadly that for a minute, Bonnie wondered if their rug really _was_ a snake, but Stefan and Damon seemed totally unfazed as the former cleared his throat and the latter's shoulders started shaking. "He did it," Stefan deadpanned, attempting to fling a finger at Damon but his elbow got stuck in the rug and he ended up pointing at himself.

Bonnie forced herself to swallow. "Did you two. Actually just detonate _fireworks_. In our _living room_."

Damon's face was about to crack as he nodded profusely. "No."

"No way," Stefan added, legitimately a human pretzel under their rug at this point as he struggled to move in any meaningful way. "Abso…malutely not, what are firecrackers?"

Bonnie's eyes were furious. _"_ I said _fireworks_."

Stefan erupted into a horribly concealed snort of laughter. "What are—" his shoulders began shaking, "—what are fireworks?"

"They go POWOWOWOWOWOW," Damon cried, and Stefan lapsed into full on, body-racking laughter, a limbless worm stuck in a shag rug.

"Are they _DRUNK_?" Bonnie hissed, completely fucking thrown by the unparalleled pile of male idiocy gathered before her: last time she'd seen them, Stefan had just finished his case and was about to go to bed and Damon was three movies deep into Die Hard.

"No," Caroline seethed, bending over to pluck something up and holding it so that Bonnie could see for herself. It was the bud of an abandoned blunt. Bonnie's eyes grew wide.

"They're _high_."

 **A/N:** _YOU DON'T CHOOSE THE CRACK LYFE THE CRACK LYFE CHOOSES YOU. I'm too exhausted to proofread this chapter so there's a SUPER strong chance it's a tonal MESS, but I had to crank this out. I might have to go back and edit the flow when I'm not sleep-deprived from studying, so drop a line if you can about what worked for you/what you liked and I can take that all into account moving forward! Do you feel like you got a slightly better sense for Damon? Are you feelin' the Bamon sparks yet? Do you like how Stefan and Caroline just keep feeding into their stereotypes of each other even though it's not an accurate depiction of who they fully are? Is any of that getting across or am I just flounderin' here. Holla atcho girllll. IN ANY CASE THANKS FOR READING MY RANDOM AU EXPERIMENT._


	4. Drigh

_**Six Mornings After**_

 _Chapter Four: Drigh_

* * *

"You guys are _high_?"

Damon pretended to hold a mic out in Stefan's carpet-tangled direction. "Stefan, are we high?'

Stefan flung a dramatic hand up to point at the ceiling. " _So_ high."

Damon swung the imaginary mic back to his lips, brow furrowing into a serious expression. "Early reports are confirming the worst."

Bonnie shot Caroline a look of utter disbelief, and Caroline raised her hands. "I don't even know."

"High as a bird," Stefan added whimsically from the floor, his outstretched hand dropping into a loose, flying motion. "We're SOOOOOOOOOAARRRRIN'."

Damon's serious expression gave way to a tossed-back head. "FLYYYYYYYIN'."

"Na-na-na-staaars and heaven and weekend rea— _hey_ ," he snapped suddenly, turning his head and pointing at Caroline, "told you I knew pop songs. _Boom_. Roasted."

" _Broasted_."

Stefan's bleary eyes lit up. "BROASTED!"

"Okay, you're going to get up," Bonnie snapped, storming over to where he was pretzeled on the floor and grabbing him by the arm. "Where the hell did you guys even—" she grunted as she attempted to hoist his unwilling deadweight, eyes watering in all the leftover smoke from the fireworks, "—get weed?"

"Where does anything come from?" Damon ventured whimsically, and Stefan's expression suddenly grew tortured, entirely ignoring Bonnie's superhuman mission to get him up.

"Why are we even here?"

"Are we human or are we dancers?"

Stefan's gaze widened in wonder, like it was the most philosophical question anyone had ever posed to him in his life.

"Jesus, how much did you smoke?"

Stefan squinted up at her. "Mmm… a bottle?"

Bonnie brows shot up in confusion. "A bottle of _weed_?"

His face crumpled. "That sounds wrong."

"DID YOU GUYS DRINK MY SVEDKA!?" a sudden screech filled the air, and Bonnie glanced over as Caroline snatched an empty handle of vodka off the floor and furiously held it up.

He threw a blind hand over his head to point in her direction. "That sounds right."

Bonnie's stare rounded, switching between Damon and Stefan in horror. "You two are drunk _and_ high!?"

Damon chuckled. "Drigh."

"DRIGH!" Stefan cried, his mind blown all over again.

"Unbelievable," Caroline exclaimed, tossing an exasperated hand up, and Bonnie shook her head in amazement.

"Tell me about i—"

"I just got that bottle, like this is why I keep it in Svetlana!"

Bonnie's outrage snagged when she realized Caroline wasn't talking about the two 'drigh' idiots in front of them. "Really?" she asked, gaze shifting back over to her in disbelief. "That's your biggest problem with this situation?"

"It was brand new, Bonnie!"

"Right, which means these two currently have _half a handle each_ plus God knows how much marijuana in their systems—now help me get this idiot up!"

Caroline snorted. "I'm not getting involved in that me—"

"Caroline," Bonnie cut in, hitting her with the I'm-your-best-friend-but-I'll-fuck-your-day-up look. " _Cancún_."

Caroline bristled in outrage. "I already made up for Cancún!"

"You will _never_ make up for Cancún."

"Bonnie, you can't just say Cancún every time you want me to do something!"

" _Canc_ _ú_ _n_."

She groaned. "Fiiiiine."

The begrudging girl dragged herself over to the middle of the living room, scowling at the number of fallen things she needed to side-step in the process, and came to an annoyed halt at Stefan's side. He immediately turned to Bonnie with a childish whine of, "Not her, she's scary."

Caroline's brows flew up. "Oh, you think this is scary?" She slowly bent down so that her hands were on her knees, head cocking to the side in frosty fake-pleasantness as it loomed over his. "Stay on that floor for one more second and I'll show you scary." Stefan gave her a blank, wide-eyed stare, and her cool expression broke. "Get up!"

" _Ahhh_ ," he garbled out, limbs flailing a bit as he scrambled to his feet.

Despite her irritation with this whole situation, Bonnie couldn't help but snort at the reaction. "Well done, Care."

She scoffed, tossing a sheet of blonde over her shoulder. "Always."

A sudden crash came from the kitchen, and all three heads whipped around—or at least, Bonnie's and Caroline's did, and Stefan glanced over about three seconds later. Bonnie's brows flew up. "Wha— _where the hell is Damon_?"

"I'm going to guess the kitchen," Caroline offered, and Bonnie set off with a groan, prompting Caroline to roll her eyes, whip out a hand to grab an aimlessly standing Stefan by the wrist, and yank him behind her as she grudgingly followed suit. "I _so_ did not sign up for this."

"Your hands are cold."

"Shut up."

"Damon!" Bonnie snapped, hands flying up in up in a 'what the hell' manner as she entered the kitchen. He was sprawled in front of the open fridge, similar to how he'd been earlier that day, except this time he was surrounded by olives and shattered glass and putting whipped cream on crackers.

"Whaddup my party people," he said, piling a thick swirl of whipped cream onto a soda cracker. "Polly wanna cracker? Oi, Stef, think fast!" Without further warning, he hurled the overflowing cracker at Stefan, and it made it about three feet before nose-diving into the ground with an unceremonious _splat_. Stefan lifted his hands to catch it two seconds after it hit the floor.

Caroline's eyes rolled ceiling-ward. "How about we start with thinking _at all_."

"You want one, Care?"

"Throw that cracker at me and I'll throw your skull out of your head."

"That seems like a no," Damon said thoughtfully. "What about you, Bonster?" His face suddenly lit up. "Bonster! Rhymes with monster! It's _perfect_!"

"What'd you do to the olive jar?" she replied, entirely ignoring the jab, and Damon scoffed dramatically.

"The question you _should_ be asking is what did the olive jar do to _me_."

"Actually, the question I should be asking is how the everloving _hell_ did you manage to get Stefan caught up in your general disastrousness?"

Damon rolled his eyes. "He's a big boy, he can think for himself—right, Stefan?"

They all turned to look at the guy in question, who was staring at his hands in wide-eyed amazement. "…so many atoms…"

"See?"

"Okay, I for one don't give a shit whose plan this was," Caroline chimed in, holding her hands up, "I just want to go back to sleep, so if everyone could ju—"

" _Damon_!" Bonnie exclaimed, surging an instinctive step forward the same second he leaned back and flattened one of his hands on a thick shard of glass. Caroline inhaled sharply, wincing at the motion, and Damon's brow furrowed.

"What?"

"What do you mean 'what', you just sliced your hand open!" Bonnie said, rushing over to the cabinet above the sink and pulling out a First Aid kit. Damon merely lifted his hand up, saw a mess of red, and frowned.

"Huh."

"Care, can I borrow your slippers?" Caroline slipped them off and nudged them over, and Bonnie quickly stepped into them before wading into the glass surrounding Damon. "Just don't move, okay?"

"Is this a dominatrix thing?"

"It's actually more of a 'you might need stitches and I don't have a local anesthetic' thing?" she mocked back, mentally cataloguing all the things she'd need if it came down to that, and Caroline broke.

"Yeah, _okay_ , that's my cue to faint, _sooo_ —"

"Whooooaaa, Damon's bleeding!" Stefan suddenly cut in, thrusting a finger in his direction. "Someone call an ambulance! Waaaaaaaaaaaooooooooooooooo—"

" _Stefan_ ," Bonnie said exasperatedly, wincing at his thunderous siren impersonation before shooting a sharp look at Caroline. "Can you get him out of here?"

"And take him where?"

"Anywhere, Caroline, I don't know!"

She swallowed her protest with an irritated sigh, recognizing the stress in Bonnie's voice: the girl didn't ruffle often, but when she did, it meant things were serious. "Come on, moron," she growled, once again grabbing Stefan's wrist and pulling him out of the kitchen behind her.

"Your hands are cold."

"Jesus Christ, kill me."

He stumbled along with relative ease as she navigated the smoky obstacle course that was their living room and made a beeline for her room. "So here's what's going to happen," she said as the crossed through the door and shut it behind them, dropping his arm and heading over to her bed, "I'm going to go to sleep, and _you_ are going to sit at my desk and think about atoms some more."

" _So_ many atoms," came the wondrous response.

"So, so many—you should try counting them," she suggested as she climbed into bed, immediately curling up onto her side, throwing the comforter over herself, and settling in for sleep. Her eyes were closed for all of five seconds before a loud series of _thuds_ snapped them open.

" _Really_?"

She lifted her head up just enough to see a once neatly piled stack of books scattered over the floor before snapping a glare up to him. His hands flew up in the faint moonlight. "Wasn't me."

Her gaze slitted. "Right, 'cause they jumped."

He considered this for a moment, stare flitting down from the table to the floor with a stricken look. "That's so sad."

"Oh my _God_ ," she groaned, throwing herself back into the bed and flinging the covers over her head. There were footsteps, some light shuffling, the creak of a chair, and then finally, after a bit more shuffling, a soft, sleepy silence. She exhaled deeply, burrowing her body deeper into her mattress.

She couldn't be sure when she heard the first page turn. Could've been ten minutes, could've been thirty, and at first, she thought nothing of it: he _would_ find a friggin' book to read in the dark while high at four in the damn morning. She was already drifting off to sleep when she heard another page turn, and something suddenly struck her about the books he had access to.

It'd have to be the ones he knocked off her desk.

Which meant—

She sat up suddenly, stare slicing through the darkness to his silhouette. He was lounged back into her chair with a speculative expression, profile to her, frown outlined in the light filtering in from her window. The book was soft and leather-bound, and her heart leapt at the immediately recognizable blue—her writing notebook. The one with all her short stories, her book ideas, her character sketches, her poetry—everything vulnerable about her was consolidated into those pages.

"Put it down."

The suddenness of her voice made him jolt slightly, gaze swinging up to meet hers.

"What?"

"My notebook— _put it down_." She kicked her way out of her covers and clambered off the bed, and he held the book up as she stormed over to him.

"This?"

"Hand it over," she hissed, taking a swipe at it, and he immediately thrust it up out of her reach.

"Did you write this?"

" _Give me the damn book_!" She jumped in another attempt to grab it and he stumbled back against the desk, knocking a few things over.

" _Jesus_ ," he laughed, throwing his free hand back on the desk to steady himself, and she grabbed his shoulder with a fierce grip and began all but climbing him to get to his other hand. "Caroline—"

"Give. Me. My. Book!"

"It's—" he winced as her nails dug into his shoulder to give her the leverage to lift a knee onto the desk, "it's actually really good, I—" his voice cut off as her elbow jabbed his throat, causing him to inhale sharply, and before he knew it, she had him straddled down to the desktop, full weight of her body on his hips. In a surprisingly quick movement for someone as out of it as he was, he dropped his arm and flipped it behind him, pressing the book tightly against his back. She lunged forward with a growl and shot both arms around him, chin digging into his shoulder, and the result was a chaotic, unstable tangle of amused taunter and rabid tauntee.

" _Stefan—"_

"What is it that you, _"_ he grimaced through a laugh as she grabbed his arm, "want again?"

"I will _break your fucking wrist_ ," she seethed, giving it a violent twist, and his eyes bloomed with pain.

"Jesus _Christ_ ," he breathed, snapping his head over to look at her in bewilderment, "why the hell are you so—"

A sudden turn of her head had his nose brushed up against hers, and the word immediately caught on his tongue, hovering there for a moment before dropping into little more than a warm, feather-light flutter of breath.

"…violent."

It was immediate, the spike of tension in the room. It thickened the air with heat, charged it with static—reversed their innate magnetism from 'repel' to 'attract' in a single, unexpected beat. The _feeling_ of it was familiar to Caroline. Biological, really—the tripping pulse, the blood heating beneath her skin—she felt it all the time, indulged in it, loved it, made sure any guy she brought home drew it out of her in spades.

The source, however, was _not_ familiar.

His heated stare was a dark, shadowed green in the lack of light, lips little more than a heartbeat away from hers. His breath stirred her skin, quiet and warm, mixing with the general heat of his body beneath hers. Perhaps it was the rareness of the situation, the unexpectedness of ever having Bonnie's insufferable best friend seconds from her mouth, hips pressed between her thighs, but something was making her veins buzz.

She couldn't really be sure.

What she could be sure of is that he wasn't reading another goddamn _word_ of her writing, so she took advantage of his momentary distraction and yanked the book out of his hand, immediately pushing off of him and hopping to her feet. He sat there for a moment, lost in thought in that way high people always were, and she rolled her eyes as she stashed the notebook under her comforter—God, she couldn't wait till this mess was over.

" _Okay_ , time for you to go," she said in a grumble, grabbing his shoulders and attempting to usher him out of the room, but just as he eased off the desk, his eyes caught on something and he grabbed up a picture frame, snapping out of his daze.

"Who's that?"

She groaned. "No one, just—"

"Is that _you_?" he said, delight lighting his face as he peered at the picture. "Look at your braces! Adorable."

"Would you just—"

" _Ohhhh_ my God, look at this one," he said, abandoning the frame on the desk to snatch up another one. "Is that you and you mom? You look just like her."

"Put that _down_."

He frowned suddenly, easily relinquishing the frame she'd pulled out of his hand to dive instead for an eyelash curler. "What the _hell_ is this?" He opened and closed it in rapid succession. "Is this a _torture_ device? I've gotta be honest, I'm not super surprised, but—"

She surged forward and caught his hand just as he made to seize something else, cutting the words right off his tongue as she shoved him back and pinned him with a fucking _guillotine_ of a stare. "I. Said. _Stop_."

He did exactly that, eyes brightening with surprise. The edge of the desk was a firm pressure against the back of his legs, her tight grip an iron cuff around his wrist, and after a silent beat of holding her bladed gaze, his stare took on a flickering sheen of curiosity. "Why are you so mean?"

It was an oddly personal question, and something about the intimacy of it threw her a bit. "What?"

"Mean," he repeated, slowly easing off the desk to take a small step forward, stare lit with an intrigue that was beginning to change his whole countenance. "You're a _mean_ girl."

The loose line of her shoulders slowly began to tense as he approached and she wasn't sure why, so she ignored it. "And I'm sure you think you're just such a nice guy."

He slowed to a halt about half a foot away from her, hand still caught in hers, stare dark as it considered the words. "Actually," he ventured, eyes ghosting down her face and coming to a slow, unexpected stop on her mouth, "I'm really not that nice."

For a moment, despite everything she'd come to know about Stefan wet blanket Salvatore, she was... kind of turned-on. It was probably shock more than anything, but nonetheless she felt herself reacting to the rumble of his voice, the unexpectedness of the answer. He was drunk, yes. He was high. But he was also looking at her like there was a big chance she'd be the one pinned against her desk in a few seconds, and intoxicated or not, it threw the hell out of her.

In an impulse, she grabbed a fistful of his shirt and forced him back, returning them to at least a foot of distance. "Finally, something we can agree on," she replied, right back into frosty autopilot, and he seemed amused as she swung the door open and ushered him out of the room.

"Mean, mean, mean," he tsked, stumbling into the living room with a loose shake of his head, and she ignored him as she shut the door behind him and dragged herself back to bed. She settled in with her usual sigh, slipping under the covers and burrowing her body into the pillows, but all the routine in the world couldn't stomp out the tiny, nagging thought persisting in her stubbornly resistant head.

Why had she pushed him away?

* * *

"— _fuck_ —"

"I said hold _still_!"

"I _am_ holdi—ow!"

Bonnie dropped his hand. "Unless you want me to pluck out your skin instead of these shards, you've _got_ to stop pulling your hand back."

"I'm not doing it on purpose, Nurse Ratchet," he growled, shoving his hand back up for her to take, "believe or not, it's a kind of a reflex to having a pair of tweezers shoved into my gaping wound."

Her brows snapped up in a fierce arch. "And why do you have a gaping wound?"

"Because you probably cursed me with your general witchiness," he muttered, and she rolled her eyes.

"Pretty sure it has more to do with your getting drunk and high and turning into a complete idiot," she countered, taking his hand with a shake of her head. "Or you know, a bigger one."

"You have a lovely bedside manner, you know tha— _ow_!"

"Damon," she sighed, lifting the tweezers in exasperation, "I need to get all of these out. Like honestly, you should be happy you don't need stitches."

His head knocked back against the fridge. "Bet you would've loved that."

"Yeah, because clearly this is so much fun," she scoffed, shooting him a disbelieving look. "I love getting woken up mid- _much needed sleep_ by fireworks going off in my living room, realizing my best friend's been possessed by my roommate's booty call from hell, and spending half an hour plucking microscopic shards of glass from said booty call's hand as he bitches incessantly about it."

His surly gaze slid up to hers, considering this for a moment, before slowly holding his hand back out. "I'll try to stop moving."

"Thank you."

She took his hand again and leaned over it, flicking a loose curl out of her face as she slowly turned it in the light. Another tiny shard glittered, and she stopped, flipping the tweezers back into a usable position in her fingers and moving in.

Damon hissed immediately, hand giving the slightest of jolts, and Bonnie sighed.

"Look, I'm trying."

"I know," she said, "but I need to get these last few before I can wrap this up, and I need you still so they don't get lost in your skin. Just… try to distract yourself."

"With what?"

"I don't know, start talking about something."

"Like _what_?"

"Like I don't know, your life, your interests, whatever."

He gave a mirthless laugh. "This again."

"No, nothing again, I don't care, just whatever keeps you fucking still."

He dropped his head against the steel fridge door yet again, eyes veering up to the ceiling.

"What's, I don't know, your favorite sex position?"

He laughed at the attempt to get him talking. "Really?"

"Isn't this your favorite topic?"

He shrugged. "Depends on the—" a hiss promptly cut through at the sharp sting in his hand, causing him to immediately snap it back, and Bonnie exhaled sharply.

" _Damon_ —"

"Whitman was one of the biggest badasses in modern poetry," he gritted out, cutting her off, and she stilled a bit in surprise. "He was this bearded, rugged dude who was gay as hell, and he basically reinvented poetry because he rejected the idea that it had to be some fancy, esoteric bullshit for the elite." She merely stared at him, slightly thrown, tweezers forgotten in her hand. He dropped his stare and nodded at them with an impatient look. "Chop chop, doc."

She shook herself a bit, snapping back into focus, and he swung his gaze back to the ceiling.

"Whitman's basically the father of free verse, and what's funny is that all the pretentious early 20th century assholes actually used that as a way to discredit him," he continued, eyes absently tracing out the ceiling tiles. "They hated him because he was this loud, happy bastard who was American as hell and wrote twenty-million line poems about how everyone was connected and shit, from prostitutes and lepers to lawyers and scholars, and naturally, the Ezra Pounds and T.S. Eliots of the world were all pissy because they clung to the idea that their restrictive 'Imagism' bullshit was _real_ poetry."

He winced slightly as she pulled a particularly deep shard, but to her surprise, didn't pull his hand back.

"Hilariously enough, though, after they grew out of their hater phase and stopped with all the Anglocentrism of 'only English poetry matters', they were all worshippy of Whitman and his contributions and suddenly started trying to act like him." He shook his head and snorted. "Like, Eliot has the balls to come out with a poem about growing up in Missouri as if he didn't jetpack over to England the second he graduated from Harvard to be trained in the 'English' way."

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye as she plucked out another shard, and he didn't even seem to notice.

"The best Whitman story though is his whole scandal with Oscar Wilde—imagine how much game this dude must've had that even as an old, wrinkly grandpa with a Santa Claus beard, he gets a twenty-something-year-old Wilde to stop at his house on his first ever American tour, and they just disappear for a few hours." Mirth brightened his stare. "And _then_ , when journalists ask Wilde about it, he's all 'can't talk bro, I have the kiss of Whitman on my lips'. What a legend."

Bonnie's lips quirked, turning his hand a final time in the light before setting the tweezers down. "Done."

He glanced down with a surprised look. "Really?"

"Yep. Amazing how fast it goes when you're not sabotaging it."

He snorted. "Again with the bedside manner."

"I'll take that as a thank you," she replied, reaching over to the kit and taking out the stuff she needed for bandaging. After a bit of rustling, she sat back up and picked his hand up again. "So how do you know so much about poetry? College?"

"Nah."

"High school?"

"Nope."

"You just… picked it up one day?"

He shrugged. "Had some anthologies lying around growing up—read a few of them."

She snorted. "I had like twenty poetry books in my house and I never read them."

"Well, I did."

Something about his tone sharpened a bit, and her ears pricked, catching onto the shift. She stayed silent for a moment, swiping his hand with an anti-bacterial swab, before casually venturing, "Did your dad like poetry?"

He gave a low sigh. "No."

She discarded the wipe and reached for the gauze. "So… the books were just lying around."

"Yep."

She began slowly wrapping the sterile bandage around his hand. "They weren't anyone else's…"

Like his mom's.

Damon rolled his eyes. "I'm not doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Becoming your little project."

Bonnie shrugged, finishing up his bandage before dropping his hand and giving him an enterprising look. "Fine, as long as I'm not yours either."

He frowned. "Come again?"

"You don't like feeling like a target, and neither do I—drop all the innuendos and the come-ons and I'll drop the prying."

He raised a brow, merely staring at her for a second. Her eyes were a bright, uncannily sharp green, as shrewd as they were pretty, and for second, he couldn't help but feel mildly impressed. "Deal."

Her mouth ticked into a cool smile, hand shooting out in offering. "Deal."

He took it with his newly bandaged one, stare still fixed on hers, and she gave it a light shake.

"So I guess that means I can't offer to pay you in sex for this."

She dropped his hand with a snort of laughter, rolling her eyes and pushing herself up to her feet. "Nope."

"I don't like this rule."

She feigned a thoughtful look as she swiped up the First Aid Kit. "Hey, which one was your mom's favorite poetry book?"

"Nevermind."

She shot a smile over her shoulder as she swept out of the kitchen, slightly surprised to be leaving a conversation with Damon on semi-good terms, though the sentiment shattered pretty quickly as her eyes adjusted to a couple of things in the living room.

Namely, the temperature.

And the fact that the window to their fire escape was open.

And the fact that she was pretty sure Stefan _wasn't_ in the apartment anymore.

 **A/N:** _Chapter four, woooot! Didn't end up having as much Baroline/bromance as I'd planned, but I think it has some pretty fun ship stuff, so hopefully you guys aren't too mad ;) Future bromance ahead, but for now, WHERE'S STEFAN? Fave quotes/bits = love. Also, this might be drowning in typos because I'm about to watch a giant football game and I gotta go. SORRY._


	5. A Christmas Miracle

**Six Mornings After**

 _Chapter Five: A Christmas Miracle_

* * *

"Do you see anything?"

"Yep—snow."

"C'mon, Damon!"

"We're trekking through a friggin' blizzard, Bonnie, what am I supposed to see?"

"Stefan!" she called out in search of her MIA best friend, cupping her hands around her mouth and ignoring Damon's bitching. She took a large, sinking step in the swallowing snow, nearly hip-deep in the stuff, and wondered for the millionth time how far he could've possibly gone.

"Steffy-bear!" Damon's voice rang out behind her. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" She shot him a look over her shoulder, blinking furiously in the zippy snowflakes eddying around her, and he shrugged. "Dude's high out of his mind—solid chance he thinks we're playing some Winter Olympics version of Hide-and-Go-Seek."

"And why's he high again?" she bit back, her anxiety ramping up her snappiness, and Damon snorted.

"'Cause he inhaled from something the cool kids are calling a blunt."

"And who gave him the blunt?"

"Why does that even matter?"

"Because none of this would've happened if it weren't for you."

"Okay, I didn't make him take six hits—he did that on his own."

"Yeah, and drug dealers don't make addicts buy drugs, they do that on their own."

"Are you calling Stefan an addict?"

"No, I'm calling _you_ an enabler."

"Well, I'm calling _you_ judgy."

Bonnie's eyes brightened in indignation, body attempting to whirl around to face him and getting caught in the snow. "I'm not—" she wobbled pitifully, petite, puffer-jacketed frame entirely stuck, "judgy."

"You're suuuuper judgy. And bossy. And kind of smothering, like damn, Stefan can make his own decisions."

"He does make his own decisions," she scoffed, irritated by this turn of conversation. "And when they're not influenced by unapologetic Hedonists with no sense for consequences, I fully support them."

"Speaking of consequences, how're you liking the results of our little truce so far?" His smirk was Cheshire. "Bet you're kind of missing the sex talk now."

"Actually, I'd be happiest with no talk. Of any kind. At all."

He shrugged. "Fine by me." He set off in the snow, stride a little hindered but otherwise steady, and Bonnie tried to whip her body around to follow. She barely budged.

"Ugh, come _on_ ," she grumbled, jimmying back and forth, unintentionally piling more and more snow on herself until before she knew it, the mountain came up to her waist. She threw her head back with a groan, blowing a limp strand of hair out of her face. "Damon?"

"Ah, ah—no talky talky," came the distant reply, and she sighed, closing her eyes in preparation for the humiliation that was about to go down.

"Damon, I'm stuck."

Silence.

She merely stood there for a beat, a friggin' snow centaur in a knitted cap and scowl, before opening a wary eye. He was about ten feet away, face positively illuminated with amusement. "I mean, are you going to stand there or are you going to help?"

"How the hell did you get stuck?"

"It's a lot of snow!"

"You're like fun-sized, it's ridiculous!"

"Damon," she sighed.

"Are you even five feet tall?"

"I'm five foot one and a half!"

He pressed a hand to his heart. "You're one of the 'and a half' people. Precious."

"Damon," she groaned, "it's cold, my clothes are all wet, Stefan is probably getting rabies from a feral cat—can you _please_ be a normal person for two seconds and help?"

He eyed her for a second, eyes glittering with with a wicked layer of mirth, before sighing. "Fine. But only if I get something out of it."

Her gaze was flat. "Shocking."

He lifted a hand to his ear, frowning as if straining to hear. "Wha—is that— _judginess_ I'm hearing, or?"

"Name your price."

His face eased into a breezy smirk. "Well, since you asked so nicely." His lips pursed, nose scrunching as his eyes veered upward in thought. "How about… for the rest of the night…"

"It's 4:30 in the morning."

"..you refer to me as 'The Real Reason my Panties are Wet'."

A strangled noise choked its way up her throat. " _Excuse_ me?"

"It's got zing to it, don't you think?"

"I'm not calling you that!"

"'Cause you really are all wet, but it gives a fun little plot twist to why, you know?"

"Why are you so _damaged_ like what happened to you?"

"Take it or leave it, Judgy."

She stared at him in complete disbelief for a solid five seconds, his pleasant expression cool and unruffled in return, before her own melted into one of tired resignation. "This is a new low, even for you."

" _Mmm_ , thinking this is more of a low for you, but…"

"So much for loving damsels in distress."

"Oh, rest-assured I'm loving every part of this."

"Just help me out." She flung a gloved hand out and he arched a brow, taking a few loping strides closer.

"Just help me out… _who_?"

Her lips thinned into a flat line. "Just help me out… Real Reason My Panties are Wet—God, saying it is even worse."

"Music to my ears," he said with a flourishing gesture, closing the distance between them and grabbing her hand. "Alright, count of three, Witchy."

"No count, just pull."

He clucked his tongue. "Patience is a virtue."

"Yeah, I'm not about to take virtue lessons from the guy extorting me into calling him 'Real Reason My Panties are Wet', _so—_ " A quick yank cut her off and she squawked in protest, lurching forward in a mini-avalanche of snow. She stumbled for a few steps before regaining her balance and shooting a glare at Damon.

"Interesting 'thank you' face."

"That's 'cause it's a 'fuck you' face."

"Objection: violation of our no sex talk agreement."

"Right, because your little nickname—which by the way I'm _done_ calling you—didn't already do that?"

Damon snorted as she brushed herself off. "That was an agreed upon temporary exception—totally different from you going off about wanting to fuck me."

"That's not what I—"

"Doesn't really matter, though, because if you don't hold up your end of our rescue deal, I'm throwing the sex ban out the window."

Bonnie crossed her puffy-sleeved arms. "Then I'm throwing the prying ban out the window."

"Something tells me I can be a lot more annoying than you."

She opened her mouth to refute the claim, rebuttal poised at the tip of her tongue, before stopping to consider. Well. Actually. " _Ugh_ , fine, whatever, the night's pretty much over anyway."

"There's a good sport."

"Let's just find Stefan."

She took a slow, effortful step forward, entire body having to lift itself to get her leg out of the snow, and Damon arched a brow. "Really sensing the urgency."

"I can't go any faster."

He watched her struggle to lift the other leg for an extraordinarily pathetic five seconds before rolling his eyes with a dramatic sigh and bending his knees. "Just get on."

She shot him a puzzled glance. "What?"

"My back—just get on."

Her brows lifted. "You're going to give me a piggyback ride?"

"All aboard the Damon Express!"

She merely stared at him for a beat before letting out a surprised laugh, and he shot her an oddly boyish grin, gesturing with his head for her to move it. She fumbled her way over to him in something of a Frankenstein's Monster impersonation and struggled to climb onto his back, ruffling at his slight chuckle when he had to bend his knees even more for her to reach.

"Shut up."

"I'm not even at ground level, like is like basement level."

"I said shut up."

"This is like the parking garage level underneath a building."

" _Just_ because you're a giant—"

"I'm really not that tall."

"—doesn't mean you can pretend I'm the mutant."

"Though comparatively, I probably look really tall. Actually, how would feel about going to bars with me as my height compar— _ow_!" He shot a surprised look over his shoulder at the marshmallow of a girl clinging to his back like a baby lemur, her stare bright with a sly glitter. "Did you just kick me?"

"Perks of being low to the ground." She gave his beanie'd head a quick pat. "Giddy up, cowboy."

He snorted, turning back around and setting off in the snowy tundra that'd become of the Boston's North End. "Gotta say, this isn't how I pictured the first time you'd ride me, but—"

" _Really_?"

" _Juuuuust_ reminding you of what's at stake."

He grinned through a wince as she kicked him again, thoroughly amused by the spitfire she was turning out to be. He had to admit, she was more playful than he'd given her credit for before. Not that he'd really known her before—or really even knew her now—but it was a fun surprise all the same. She had a natural sass to her that bordered on fiery, and a counterbalancing patience that seemed to keep it from being too loud or explosive. It was a rare blend, and fun as hell to riff off of.

Her hand suddenly squeezed his shoulder. "Do you hear something?"

He stopped, squinting into the blizzard for a silent beat. "Just general wintry misery."

" _Shhhhhh,_ " she snapped, holding up a hand, and his face crumpled in disbelief.

"You _shhhhhh_ , you just asked me a que—"

His words cut off as a faint voice carried over in the wind: low, babbling. It was coming from down the street, in and out, and although they could only catch a few words—'ferris wheel', 'tuna', and 'bobsledding'—it was unmistakably Stefan's.

"Stefan!" Bonnie cried, pointing down the street, and Damon set off in a dutiful trudge, amused by what anyone looking out their window would see: a fierce midget in a Michelin man jacket pointing like a visionary conquistador as her valiant abominable snowman took her to the promised land. It took about twenty loping strides till the rambling voice grew clear, and five more before they actually spotted him.

Bonnie immediately groaned and Damon let out a bark of laughter.

He was sitting on top of a horse statue.

A horse statue that was about twenty feet off the ground.

"—told 'em that forestry law wouldn't like that ish, 'cause like _hello_ , haven't they ever heard of sustained yield, I mean—" his rambling cut off as he seemed to catch sight them, leaning forward with a squint, and after a few seconds he threw his entire body back in delight. "FRIENDS!" He tossed his hands up and nearly fell off the statue in the process.

Bonnie yelped, hopping off Damon's back and trudging a few steps forward in the snow. "Stefan, _what the hell are you doing up there_!?"

"Chillin'," he replied, barely containing an explosion of laughter.

Damon glanced at Bonnie. "It's funny 'cause it's cold out."

"How did he even get up there?" Bonnie hissed, and Stefan suddenly sat up straighter in excitement.

"You guys need to meet my new friend Flo!" he said, throwing a blind hand back to pat the face of the statue man behind him. "She works for Progressive!"

"Hi, Flo!" Damon said, lifting a hand to wave while quietly leaning over to Bonnie. "Do you want to tell him that's Paul Revere or should I?"

"Stefan, however you got up there, you need to take the same way down!" Bonnie called up to Stefan, entirely ignoring the useless bag of sass beside her. "For Christ's sake, you're not even wearing a jacket!"

" _Pshhhhhh_ , I'm FI—"

Bonnie shrieked as he suddenly lost his balance, tipping over the obscured side of the statue and disappearing from sight. She ran to the other side as fast as she could, footsteps jabbing into the snow like furious icepicks, and after a few terrifying seconds, found him sitting at the bottom of a mini-hill of accumulated snow. "Oh, thank _God_ ," she breathed, gaze flitting up the mound and seeing that it led all the way up to the horse like a slide—so that's how he'd gotten on. God, this _idiot_. "You might not process this right now," she growled, holding up an entirely unintimidating polka-dot gloved hand in his direction, "but I _will_ get you back for this." He gave a loopy grin in response, and Bonnie rolled her eyes. "Get up."

"Nah."

Bonnie sighed. "Damon?"

"Coooome on, buddy," Damon stepped in, trudging over and picking Stefan up by the elbows. "Let's play a fun game called Not Getting Hypothermia." He helped the wobbly guy get steady on his feet before moving behind him and grabbing him by the shoulders to steer him forward. "You gettin' in on this, Judgy?"

She wobbled over with a sigh and climbed back onto his back, entirely aware of how goddamn _ridiculous_ this whole situation was and unsure whether to laugh or groan about it.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain, Real Reason My Panties Are Wet, speaking," Damon announced in a nasally voice as he set off, pushing her reaction closer to the laughing side. "As we prepare for takeoff, please make sure to keep your arms and legs in the vehicle at all times, though do feel free to let them wander…"

She snorted at the inevitable direction that took, giving him a light shove.

"I didn't say _where_."

They made the pilgrimage home in relative peace (outside of a few screeched out ' _chooo choooooooos!'_ from Stefan), and by the time they were back in front of the fire escape, Bonnie had decided the situation was kind of hilarious. Like sure, they'd probably all be super sick tomorrow, but sometimes you just gotta take the good with the bad. It was better than fighting, anyway. Besides, if they were all going to be stuck together for two days, they might as well make memories, right?

She was almost sad Caroline had missed it, though waking Caroline up to trudge through a blizzard to go rescue a rogue Stefan? _Not_ really an option. The two were her best friends, but they certainly weren't each other's. She'd tried like hell in the beginning to make them get along, back when her and Caroline had first moved to Boston, but it was weird—they both became… off around each other. Like all the things Bonnie knew Stefan would like about Caroline just disappeared and all the things she knew Caroline would like about Stefan disappeared.

They almost fed into each other's stereotypes of each other. She knew who they both were, so she saw through it, but they didn't really have anything but their weird antagonism to go off. After a year, she'd just let it be. If they wanted to fix it, they could.

"Home, sweet home, folks," Damon said, patting Stefan's shoulder as Bonnie detangled her arms from his neck and slipped off him.

"Did we win the game?" Stefan asked, and Damon lifted a gloved hand in high five.

"Crushed it."

" _Yessss_ ," Stefan said, aiming for his hand and missing by a solid half a foot, causing Damon to snort.

"Close enough."

Stefan's stare grew thoughtful as Bonnie brushed herself off, stare fixing on something behind her and Damon. "Huh. Cool crossbow."

Damon face creased into an amused frown, though before he could say anything, a voice behind him said, "Thanks."

" _What_ the—" Damon whipped around in a sudden movement, eyes growing wide at the sight of a _giant fucking crossbow five inches from his nose_. "WHAT THE _FUCK_?" he cried, jolting back immediately and lifting a hand up to shield his face.

There was a fucking _sniper_. Perched on the neighboring fire escape. With _laser goggles_. And black leather gloves. _AND A CROSSBOW._

"Oh, _God_ , not again—Kai!" Bonnie cried, hopping in front of Stefan and Damon and throwing her hands out in a half-greeting, half barrier, face cracking into an immediate, over-bright, freaked out smile. "Kai, it's me, Bonnie, your neighbor! Hey, there!" His hyper-focused gaze slid over to her, and she waved a nervous hand. "Me. Familiar. Neighbor." He continued to stare at her motionlessly for a second, unblinking, before suddenly cracking into a bright, megawatt smile.

"Bonnie, hey! Howdy, neighbor! How's…" he cast around for a second, brow furrowing as he lifted a gloved hand to snap his fingers searchingly, and Bonnie swallowed.

"Caroline?"

"Right, Caroline! How's the old gal doing?"

"She's great! Just off being Caroline, you know—"

"Can we maybe put down the medieval weaponry!?" Damon interjected, bewildered gaze trained on the crossbow still perched on Kai's shoulder, and the lanky neighbor immediately flipped back into psychopath-mode and re-aimed it at his face.

"Who're your friends?" he asked pleasantly.

"Oh, uh, you'd really like them, I think! This is Stefan—he's been my best friend since forever, and, uh, this is Caroline's friend Damon, who—"

In a testament to just how _bone-deep_ shitheadedness ran, a low, unexpected throat clearing interrupted her.

She glanced over her shoulder at Damon with a frantic _'what_!?' look, and his brows rose. "Caroline's friend Damon?"

Her face crumpled, entirely perplexed by the question and about to cast it off as senseless, when it suddenly dawned on her. Oh. Oh, _no_. Oh, he _had_ to be kidding. " _No_ ," she hissed.

"Deal's a deal, kid."

" _Damon_ —"

"Who?"

"There is a goddamn _crossbow in your face_ and you're going to—"

"There's been a mistake in the intros," he said in a helpful aside to Kai, waving between him and Bonnie, and Kai arched a brow.

Bonnie pressed her lips together, slitted stare seething in Damon's direction, before twisting back around and giving Kai a tight, twitchy smile. "What I _meant_ to say," she gritted out, gloved hands bunching into fists, "was this is Damon." Her jaw clenched, eyes fluttering closed in denial. "The Real Reason My Panties Are Wet."

Kai dropped his bow slightly, processing the answer with a bright, thoughtful expression. And then, "I'mma shoot him."

" _No_!" she snapped, pushing the bow away as he yanked it back up at Damon's face, tossing her rescue-ee a furious scowl in the process. " _Happy_?"

"Ecstastic—come on Steffy, up we go!" Damon replied, ushering Stefan up the fire escape in a scramble of flailing limbs, and Bonnie sighed in relief as she saw them clear the window. Thank God. She simply stood there for a moment, chest rising and falling, waiting for her breathing to ease a bit and her pulse to cool, when she suddenly grew aware of the magnified pair of reptilian eyes glued to her face. She slowly lifted her own to meet them, body filling with dread.

"….so, uh. Think I'd better—"

"Wanna see my spleen collection?"

That was as good a cue as any. "Night, Kai!"

She clambered up the fire escape in much the same frantic manner as Damon and Stefan had, immediately bolting the window shut the second she'd gotten inside. She turned around and collapsed against it, hand against her heart, thawing in the warmth.

She really, really needed this damn night to _chill_.

"He seems fun," Damon called out from what seemed to be her room, and she immediately frowned, pushing herself off the window and walking over to her door.

"What are you—" she paused when she saw him rifling through her drawer, eyes growing wide. " _Hey_!"

"Relaaax, Judgy," he said, not even bothering with looking up, "I threw Stefan in the shower and he's going to need some dry clothes when he gets out—figured your evident fondness for flannels and sweatpants would make your closet more promising than Caroline's."

Her stare flattened at the jab, though before she could respond, his face took on a glitter, hand reaching for something that he gingerly lifted up. The lacy negligee Caroline had gotten her for their Galentine's Day celebration a few years ago dangled from his finger, and he swung his gaze up to hers in innocent question.

Her eyes slitted. "If you think your can say a _single_ word about that after I just held up our deal in a _life-death situation_ , I'll shoot you with the crossbow myself." He smirked, dropping the flimsy fabric with a casual flick and lifting his hands up in a 'no comments here' manner. "Good choice."

"So, what's that dude's deal, anyway?" he asked, resuming his search and plucking up a large red t-shirt.

"Kai?" She snorted. "No idea—Caroline and I are convinced he's a serial killer."

"Got any evidence?" The t-shirt unraveled as he held it up, and it read 'Gryffindor' in bright gold letters. He shot her a ' _really_?' look.

She rolled her eyes. "I mean, all the cats on the third floor disappeared the day after he moved in, if that's what you mean." He returned his stare to the shirt and she sighed. "Just put it down."

"Nah, Steffy's wearing this one. Gryffin- _ROAR_!"

" _Caroline's sleeping_!" she hissed, gesturing for him to keep his voice down, and he snorted, pulling out an oversized pair of Emory sweatpants that matched the one's he'd borrowed from Caroline.

"Girl sleeps like a rock, she'll be fine."

"Rocks don't sleep."

"You're _kidding_."

She pursed her lips at his overdone shock, and he promptly dropped the look, sliding her drawer shut and easing to his feet. "I can take those—"

"Nah, don't worry about it, you look exhausted and I'm still wired," he said, cradling the clothes under his arm as she dropped her hand. "I can put Steffy-bear to bed."

Her brow furrowed, eyes bright with curiosity at the unexpected gesture. "Really?"

"Yeah, he's pretty tame as far as 'drigh' people go."

She frowned. "Speaking of drigh people, shouldn't you be one of them?"

He shrugged. "I didn't take as many hits as he did, and I'm pretty sure I have a _sliiiightly_ higher tolerance."

"Low bar."

He snorted. "Very low."

She merely eyed him for a beat, his face strangely lit in the faint wash of morning light slowly peeking in through her window, struck by the sudden feeling of not quite knowing what to make of him. "I'm not going to wake up in an hour to more fireworks, right?"

He immediately opened his mouth to say something, paused, and then closed it begrudgingly. "This sex ban is killing my conversation."

Her stare crinkled. "Maybe that should tell you something."

"Ugh," he groaned, moving to pass her. "Depth at five in the morning, gross."

"Hey," she said with a laugh, catching his elbow and stopping him. He turned to look down at her, annoyingly tall and even more absurdly handsome from this particular vantage point, and her lips took on a genuine curl. "Thanks. You know, for helping me find Stefan. You didn't have to do that."

His gaze flickered down her face for a second, vague and oddly... softened. "Sure I did."

Her brows ticked up. He looked like was about to say something quiet, something uncharacteristically meaningful, and she was surprised to find her skin prickling under the raptness of his gaz—

"'Cause if you'd gone out there by yourself, you'd have frozen into a snow midget in literally three seconds, and then _both_ you and Stefan would be classified as missing people, and then the first thing I've gotta deal with after finally getting out of this nightmare breakfast club is the BPD knocking on my door and making me sign a bunch of stuff, and I'm not about that CSI life so—"

"You're ridiculous," she cut him off, stare bright with amusement, and he winked.

"Night, Judgy."

"Night, Damon."

His eyebrows drew together, face crumpling in thought. "…who?"

"Oh, my _God_."

"Night's not over yet."

"The sun's already coming up!"

"Still the same night."

She sighed, entirely exasperated. "Goodnight, Real Reason My Panties Are Wet."

"Sweet dreams, Judgy."

She watched him leave with a harassed look before turning around, shaking her head, and collapsing straight into her bed.

What a freaking _night_.

* * *

"…then you told the stripper to call you Carlos—"

" _What_?"

"Yeah, man, you were super insistent, like it was kind of weird—do you have a Carlos kink or something?"

"I don't even know a Carlos."

Damon sat back in his chair with a shrug, the bright noon light reflecting off the snow and into the kitchen with dazzling intensity. Normally, the glitter it cast over everything would be pretty, but when it was hitting a kitchen housing two aggressively hungover men, one of which had a spotty memory of the night before, it was no bueno. "I don't know what to tell you."

Stefan slowly shook his head. "Christ, last night was a disaster. And why the hell is the sun _screaming?_ "

"Shut up, sun!" Damon yelled, and Stefan immediately winced, lifting a hand.

"You screaming doesn't help."

So maybe one of them was more hungover than the other.

"So," Damon said, taking a deep swig of his coffee, "what's the last thing you remember?"

Stefan sighed. "I remember getting to the fifth Die Hard, and talking about like… what we would do in that situation, and you said you'd go 'fuck it' and get high, and then… somehow we were getting high… and then we were… recreating Die Hard?"

Damon winked. "With fireworks."

Stefan scrubbed a hand over his face. "God, we did that."

"Hell yeah, we did. We also lit the rug on fire but I don't think they know that."

" _What_?"

"Well, well, well," a new voice said, and both of them looked over to where a freshly showered Bonnie was sweeping into the kitchen. Her stare was pointed as she made her way to the coffee machine and poured herself a cup. "If it isn't my ex-best friend."

"Bon," Stefan began, shaking his head in such shockingly genuine guilt that Damon had to do a double-take, "I'm so sorry," he said, pushing his chair back and getting up to his feet. "Like I don't even—I honestly don't know how any of that even happened. I'll pay for whatever we ruined." He walked up behind her and rubbed his neck as she swiveled around, and when her gaze didn't crack, his own shifted to the floor. "I feel so bad, honestly—you and Caroline are letting us both crash here and we just wrecked the living room, and… just know I'll fix it."

Bonnie merely stared at him for another beat before glancing at Damon. "Do you see what I have to deal with?" She flicked a hand in Stefan's direction. "Could you ever stay mad at that?"

"It's like kicking a puppy."

" _Right_?"

"I'm serious, Bon, I'll fix everythin—"

"Shut up, it wasn't _that_ bad," she said, pulling him into a hug, and he eased into it with hesitant relief.

"Even the strippers?"

Bonnie choked, pulling back. "The _what_?"

Damon stifled laugh into his coffee and Stefan frowned, glancing over his shoulder at him. His eyes quickly narrowed in realization, and Damon's shoulders began shaking so hard they could register on a Richter scale.

"Was all of the shit you just told me I couldn't remember made up?"

" _Completely_ ," Damon managed through his hitching breath, waving a flippant hand.

Bonnie snorted despite herself. "You're an asshole."

"The violin?" Stefan pressed.

"Yep."

"The striptease for the old man across the street?"

" _Yep_."

"Lighting the carpet on fire?"

"Oh, no, that one was actually—" he trailed off when he saw Bonnie's face, clearing his throat. " _Yep_."

"Then what the hell even happened last night?"

Bonnie sighed. "You got drunk, got high, set off a bunch of fireworks, snuck out the window, climbed up the Paul Revere memorial, and hung out in the blizzard for an unidentified amount of time until we found you."

His hands flew up. "I remember all of that!"

"Well, there you go."

"You," he said, pointing at Damon as he circled back to the table and collapsed into his chair again, "are the worst."

Damon shot him a blithe smile as he eased out of his own seat and headed to the stove. "Guilty. Now who's hungry?"

"This girl," Bonnie said, raising a hand, and Stefan pulled a face at the idea of food.

Damon shrugged. "Breakfast for two it is."

Stefan merely sighed, dropping his head in his hands and wincing through his headache. "In any case, for whatever it's worth, sorry, guys."

"For what?" Caroline asked as she breezed into the kitchen, her lion's mane of blonde hair at violent odds with her dainty blue robe, and his stare flicked up through his hands, unintentionally catching on a derailingly long expanse of leg before snapping up to her face.

"Everything," he replied in a humorless laugh. "Setting off fireworks, wandering out into the blizzard—"

"Trying to kiss me," she tacked on casually as she poured herself a cup of coffee, causing his sentence to snag on his tongue. Bonnie's stare snapped up from the crossword puzzle she'd swiped up, surprise brightening the green, and Damon glanced up from his pancake-mixing with a thoroughly amused look.

"Check Stefan out—makin' moves on the roomie. I'd like to think this is my influence."

"What? I didn't—" he glanced at Bonnie with a surprised laugh, "I didn't try to kiss he—"

Caroline's snort cut him off. "Yes, you did."

"Uh, no, I didn't?"

"Uh, _yes_ , you did?"

"When did I—"

She waltzed out of the kitchen before he could even finish his sentence, carelessly sipping her coffee, and his jaw clenched— _why_ did she always do that? His gaze shot back to Bonnie and Damon. "I didn't try to kiss her."

Bonnie's brows arched. "That's not what she seems to think."

"Why would I kiss her? I can barely talk to her," he scoffed, and Damon let out a vibrant laugh.

"That's adorable."

"Maybe you just don't remember?"

"No, we just established I remember everything, she's just—" he sighed, exhaling sharply and pushing his chair back, "you know what? I'll prove it. Easy solution."

Bonnie looked uncertain. "Stef, even if she's right, it's not a huge deal—people do pretty stupid things when they're drunk, let alone drunk and high."

"Right, and I did plenty, but this is just her blatantly making things up and frankly, it's irritating."

Bonnie and Damon stared after him as he set off to find her, his typically even-kiln countenance radiating annoyance, charged in a way he hadn't been literally five seconds ago, and they exchanged a telling glance once he was gone. Damon lifted his spatula. "Twenty bucks says he did it."

Bonnie rolled her eyes. "Really, Damon?" He shrugged, gaze returning to his pancakes in a 'just sayin' manner, and she dug something out of her pocket for a moment before slamming a five-dollar bill on the table. "I'm a med student, I can only bet five."

His face broke into a grin.

Stefan's, meanwhile, was slightly less enthused, and when he finally spotted Caroline brushing her hair in the bathroom she was so inexplicably fond of, he pushed the door open with a glare. "What the hell is your problem?"

She shot him a disbelieving look from the corner of her eye. "Wow, knock much?"

"Because you're so concerned with modesty."

She snorted. "Someone's testy."

"I didn't try to kiss you, Caroline."

"Ever think that maybe you're so mad right now because you know you did?" she posed thoughtfully, and his stare rolled ceiling-ward.

"I'm not _mad_ , I'm—"

"Mad."

"—irritated."

She chuckled, stare returning to her reflection as she brushed out a particularly stubborn knot. " _So_ mad. Dunno why, really—it's not super surprising."

His gaze flickered with realization as it dropped back to hers, and he cleared the doorway and stepped fully into the room. "Is that it?" he pressed. "You pride yourself on getting guys to want you, so you just make it up when they don't?"

Caroline threw her head back and laughed. " _Woooow_ , that's a whole new kind of reach."

Stefan shrugged. "I don't know, it sounds pretty plausible to me."

She dropped the brush and turned to stare at him. "Really, it sounds plausible to you that the only thing a girl like me could take pride in is how many men want her to the point that she'd make up unwanted sexual advances?" He faltered a bit at the re-wording and she snorted, shaking her head. "Why doesn't that surprise me."

"That's not what I meant."

" _Mmm_ , yeah, but it's what you said."

"I didn't say it was 'the only thing' you took pride in."

"Okay, then what else do you think I take pride in?"

He scoffed. "I don't know, I don't know you."

"And yet you know me well enough to 'know' I need every guy in a room to want me."

"That's not—"

"—what you meant?"

His mouth shut at the counter, her frosty blue stare burning holes into his. He was too hung-over for this. After a tense moment, he dropped his gaze. "Alright, you know what, you're right: that comment was out of line—"

"Sexist is the word you're looking for."

"—but I didn't try to kiss you."

A surprised laugh bubbled out of her throat. "Oh my God, we're back to this."

"It's a matter of goddamn principle, Caroline, you can't just go making up whatev—" his voice cut off as she suddenly moved forward, grabbed him by the shirt, and pushed him back against the door hard enough that it shut behind them.

"Let's refresh your memory: you were like _this,_ " she said, grabbing a fistful of shirt forward to pull his face into hers, "I had your hand like this," she reached up and caught his wrist in her fingers, "and you had just finished telling me that you weren't, in fact, _all that nice of a guy_."

A tense stretch of silence filled the room.

He merely stared, head simultaneously splitting and reeling in the sudden, explosive proximity of her, this goddamn _hurricane_ of blonde hair and lavender. Actually, more of a tornado, really, since you always knew when a hurricane was coming. Caroline wrecked without warning.

"Sparking any memories?" she drawled, stare briefly flitting down his face before lifting back to his eyes, and he forced himself out of his involuntary silence.

"Plenty." His voice was thicker than he wanted it to be, stare unable to resist dropping to her mouth. "None of which involve trying to kiss you, unfortunately."

She hummed thoughtfully, the low, velvety vibration a rumble in his ears, "Maybe you're forgetting the look you were giving me when you said it. Think it was something like this?"

Her gaze began an achingly slow descent down his face, grazing over the sharp slope of his nose, the flared base, the brief, stubbled hook above his cupid's bow, before landing in a quiet, hypnotic flutter on his mouth. It lingered for what felt like an eternity, her face easing the slightest bit closer, before snapping back up to his stare in a single, magnetic flick.

The line of his jaw tightened.

"Anything?" she demurred, head cocking the slightest bit to the side, and for a split-second, all he could process was the kind of access to her mouth that gave him. Jesus, was he still fucking drunk?

"'Fraid not."

The slightest of furrows formed between her brows. "Hm. Weird."

"Not really, considering there's nothing to remember."

Her seduction routine cracked as she threw her head back in a scoff. " _Wow_ , you're _really_ going to be that dumb about this?"

"How am I being dumb?"

"You tried to kiss me, Stefan, just own up."

"I'm not owning up to something that isn't true."

"Why are you so obsessed with disproving this?"

"Why are you obsessed with proving it?"

"I wasn't until you tried to call me a liar because you don't like the fact that drunk you's a _lot_ more honest about what he's feeling than sober you."

"Caroline, if I wanted to kiss you, you'd know."

"Right, which is why I did know."

"No, I mean you would _know_."

" _Yeah,_ and I _did_."

" _No_ ," he countered, and with the same volatile suddenness she'd had him pushed against the door, he tugged at her hand, dropped his free hand to her waist, and flipped her back against it, effectively reversing their positions. This time, though, there was no distance. This time, his body landed pressed against hers, the swell of her chest tucked beneath the swell of his, the flare of her hips caught between the sharp V of his, and the flutter of his breath hot against the startled part of her lips.

His stare slid down her face like something melted, a slow, hazy, hooded green, and found its increasingly familiar home on the swell of her bottom lip. When he finally spoke, his mouth was so close that it ghosted against hers, nose a faint brush against her skin. "I mean, _you would know_."

The murmur left her completely, unprecedentedly silent.

He merely stood there for a moment, breathing her in, that _ludicrously_ fragrant lavender smell tinting his every thought faintly purple. Her body was warm under his. Soft, pliant—she felt naked beneath her thin robe, no jutting underwire or elastic band pushing back against him, and the aroused darkening of his stare in response was instinctive. He forced himself to pull back before any other instincts could kick in, taking a swift step back and clearing his throat slightly.

"That clear things up?"

Her stare was guarded as it held his, and when she finally spoke, it lacked its usual smugness. "Agree to disagree."

His lips flicked into an instinctive, thin-lipped smile, countenance not betraying the residual buzzing in his blood. "Guess that's as close to a win as I'll get with you."

She gave her typical wintry smile in response, but something about it lacked its usual teeth. "Guess so."

He gave her a final, unsteady look before side-stepping her and pulling the door open, causing her to jump slightly as it touched her back. He pointed outward. "I'm just—"

"Go," she said impatiently, shuffling out of the way, and he cleared into the living room, easing the door shut behind him. The air was strikingly thinner, and he immediately took a deep, head-clearing breath of it.

Well.

That didn't really go as planned.

He wanted to revel in it. To document those rare few seconds where he'd had the upper hand, where he'd said something she didn't have a biting reply for, where he'd finally felt like just once, she didn't leave a conversation in obnoxiously effortless control of the situation. But honestly, all he could think of was how counterproductive that whole thing was.

'Cause in trying to prove he hadn't been trying to kiss her, all he'd wanted to do was fucking kiss her. More than kiss her. Lock the door. Break the door.

And leaning back against said door was a thoroughly disoriented, hot-skinned blonde who felt the exact same thing.

Call it a Christmas miracle.

 **A/N:** _Better late than never, right? Baroline ahead, since I keep expecting to write them and then starting at a point that doesn't naturally lead to them. Blah. Hopefully this chapter gave you a little more insight into Bamon's dynamic, what's going on in Stefan's head, and how hilariously big bro/little bro Defan are going to be throughout this fic. I want to give a quick shoutout to all you awesome reviewers, and a special one to Holly-Go-Smite-Thee for leaving the most insightful reviews like EVER that honestly teach me more about this fic than I even knew about it! I read them and go "OOOOOH, good point!" as if I didn't even write it, looooool. I swear I'll reply to all of them once I can get a free second, but for now, I figured you'd want the chapter more than a response, so here it is! Maybe the length will make up a bit for the wait. Let me know what you think! 3, Gabi._


	6. Daddy Issues

**Six Mornings After**

Chapter Six: Daddy Issues

* * *

"A Cinderella angle? _Really_?"

Caroline slowly began massaging her temple as her team's new marketing intern launched into his 'big idea!' for Fendi's summer shoe line, eyes closed and phone propped against her ear by a lifted shoulder. Her free hand dropped from its expectant hover over her laptop keyboard as it became _amply_ clear there was going to be nothing of substance to write down.

"—thinking we have a faceless shot of the model in the foreground turning back, hair all flying, to look at the prince who's holding up her shoe, and the only thing in focus is the shoe on the foot she's stepping with, and then—"

"—we get fired for taking three weeks to come up with something 'edgy and inventive' and ending up with the oldest, most overdone shoe cliché in the book?" she cut in, dropping her hand from her temple and opening her eyes.

Silence came from the other end.

She sighed, glancing out her bedroom window to the snow falling in the darkening afternoon. "Look, Aaron, I get it, you're new at this," she said, pushing a hand through her hair, "but this isn't college. This is real life, and in real life, you don't get critiqued for a bad idea, you get fired, so if you want this internship to turn into a job, you have to see every brainstorming shot we give you as your chance to stand out. That means you have to do a _hell_ of a lot better than marketing sexy stilettos as a fairytale romance."

She could practically hear him nodding nervously on the other end of the line. "You're right. Sorry, God, I'm so sorr—"

"Ugh, God, no, none of the apologizing—just fix it."

"Okay."

Caroline sat there for a moment, blinking. Then, "Okay?"

"Oh, you mean _now_?"

"No, I mean next year."

"Um, I—" he swallowed, "I haven't really… what if we—"

"Look at the shoes," she said a bit more gently, plucking up a product shot of the high, strappy blue heels with the Fendi clasp. "What do they say to you, what would make someone want to put them on?"

"I—well," he cleared his throat, "I mean, they're sexy."

"Right," she said, holding the shot up in the light. "Sexy, flashy, hot—you wear these shoes to be noticed, to make a statement. I'm not about to teeter around in these and permanently disfigure my feet for no one to notice."

"Yeah," he said, his voice taking on a bit more confidence, "and the electric blue kind of gives it a wild streak, even though they're a pretty classic structure."

"Great, perfect, use that: we want to make these shoes seem one of a kind. Good place to start is playing them up as this super rare combination of classic but wild."

He suddenly inhaled sharply. "You know what we can do?"

Her lips quirked despite herself at the eagerness—interns were a headache more than anything, but their naïve brightness always reminded her of how excited she used to get. "What?"

"Keep the Cinderella angle to represent the 'classic', but spin it so that the shoes drive the prince so wild that rather than looking longingly after her as she runs away, this normally polite, mannered, boringly perfect prince has Cinderella shoved up against a wall."

For a split second, she was hit with an entirely uninvited flash of Stefan pressed up against her, his save-the-rainforest gaze a dark, hooded green as it slid down her face. It wasn't the first time since that morning. Hell, it wasn't even the fifth time—she'd been vaguely distracted all day, and it was annoying the everloving shit out of her.

"—totally great, right?"

She shook her head slightly. "What?"

"The concept headline!"

She blinked a few times. "Give it to me one more time?"

"'Some shoes make Prince Charming the hero of the story. Others make him the villain.'"

"Uh," she said, irritated with the fact that her skin still felt a little hot, "a little rape-y, but we can workshop it."

He let out a squeal of delight at the near-approval, immediately launching into a gushing spiel of tweaks and suggestions, and she could already feel the headache coming on. Thankfully, a knock on the door gave her an out. "Aaron, hey, sorry, timeout—I'm going to have to call you back."

"Okay! I'll just keep working on this in the meantime! I have so many ideas, oh my God, you're the best mentor eve—"

She hung up with an exasperated click. "It's open."

The door nudged forward a few inches, and a pretty head of mahogany curls poked into her room. "You busy?"

Caroline heaved a long-suffering sigh. "Always."

Bonnie took that as her cue to flounce right in, closing the door behind her and hopping onto the end of her bed. " _So_ ," she said, folding her legs beneath her and leaning forward conspiratorially, "I know what you've been thinking about all day."

Caroline froze slightly.

" _Aaaaaaand_ I just wanted to let you know I've been thinking the exact same thing."

Her face crumpled in confusion, and Bonnie clapped her hands together, eyes sparkling.

"Revenge."

"Oh!" Caroline broke into an awkward, instinctive smile, relief easing the line of her shoulders. "Right, obviously."

Bonnie grinned, eyes crinkled in villainy delight. "So here's what I'm thinking: we pretend that…" she trailed off as her gaze caught on something, face lighting up. "Have you been writing again?"

"What?" Caroline followed Bonnie's gaze to the blue writing journal on her nightstand. "Oh, that—not really. Stefan knocked it over last night and I just forgot to put it away."

Bonnie winced. "Right, Stefan. About that. Look, I don't really know what he did—hell, I don't think he even really knows what he did, but—"

"It was nothing," Caroline cut in, and Bonnie's nose scrunched.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah, I mean he was a little chattier than usual, which was annoying, but aside from that, same boring Stefan."

"So that whole tried-to-kiss-you thing…?"

She shrugged. "Just some weird high person impulse—not like it'd ever happen sober."

She wasn't entirely sure why she was downplaying it. Like yeah, he'd mostly been the same, but there was a pretty marked moment where he wasn't. And proving a point or not, it _had_ happened again, and for some beyond baffling reason, part of her was stuck on the idea of a round three. So why not just tell Bonnie everything? She'd never cared to spare details before. It wasn't the friend issue—she'd hooked up with one of her med school buds before—though Stefan did seem like a slightly special case.

She should just—

"Makes sense," Bonnie said, cutting through her thoughts, and after a beat, she let out a small snort. "I mean, let's be real, Stefan hasn't even really looked at another girl since Elena, and that ish was like two years ago, so whatever he did," she waved a hand, lips lifting into a grin, "rest-assured it was the marijuana talking. You're safe."

Caroline's lips ticked into a half-hearted smile. "Right."

Elena. She vaguely knew the story there—boy meets girl, boy distorts girl into perfect angel from heaven, boy gets cheated on by girl, boy will 'never be the same'. It'd been one of the things Bonnie had expected them to bond over when they'd first met, their shared rocky romantic histories, but honestly, it'd actually made Caroline dislike him more. All she really saw was another guy boxing a girl into an impossibly idealized mold she didn't actually fit into.

No question, cheating was a beyond shit thing to do to someone.

But so was that.

And honestly, being a victim of one thing didn't cancel out being the perpetrator of another.

A sudden laugh drew her out of her thoughts. "Sorry," Bonnie said between breaths, "I'm just trying to picture Stefan in all his high glory hitting on you of all people and—" she snorted, waving a hand in a make-it-stop gesture.

Caroline frowned. "Me of all people?"

Bonnie scoffed, shooting her a ' _really?'_ look. "No secret he's not your favorite person, Care." She shook her head, eyes bright with mirth. "And even without that, going from the epitome of all things smooth and sexy that is Damon to a Stefan that can't even get the alphabet right is just…" she burst into another laugh, and this time Caroline arched an intrigued brow.

"Smooth and sexy, huh?"

Bonnie gave an exaggerated roll of her eyes. "Objectively, obviously."

"Sounds pretty subjective to me..."

"God, you sound just like him."

Caroline shrugged. "Hooking up with him was more vanity than anything."

Bonnie laughed, shaking her head as Caroline grinned. "Okay," she said, clapping her hands, "enough about that: I came here for revenge and I'm not leaving without a Caroline-quality plan complete with twelve contingencies, a Venn diagram, and monogrammed invitations."

Caroline hummed, easing back into her pillows and crossing her arms over her chest, bottom lip twisting as she chewed it in consideration. "What devastation level are we aiming for?"

"Chernobyl." Caroline shot her a surprised look and Bonnie shrugged. "They burned my favorite rug."

"Well, in that case…" her lips slowly unfurled into a Cheshire smirk. "Remember that time I was a theater major for a semester?"

Bonnie scoffed. "You mean that time I ran lines with you till _five AM_ for a whole week only for you to get on stage and make up the entire second act because 'Ophelia would never kill herself over a pissbaby like Hamlet'?"

"Okay, that shit was _sexist_."

"It's like four centuries old."

"There's never a wrong time for progress, Bonnie."

"You made her kill everyone!"

"Uh, _yeah_ , but then I made her CEO of a livestock company, _so_ —" she waved a sudden hand, "you know what? Doesn't matter, because my superior improv skills are about to come _extremely_ in handy."

Bonnie's amused stare slowly grew conspiratorial. "What'd you have in mind?"

* * *

"It's literally the same thing."

"How can you say that?"

"Uh, because it's true?"

"It's _not_ true—like that's so close-minded that I'm honestly wondering what kind of person you are."

"It's the same process with a different presentation—what the hell else changes besides the structure?"

"The quality!"

"The quality's the same, it's the same batter!"

"Are you _out of your mind_?" Damon exclaimed, pulling his head up from the couch he was stretched over in a careless sprawl to shoot Stefan a scandalized look, though his gaze promptly snagged on the brunette coming out of Caroline's room. "Judgy, thank God—can you _please_ explain to this lunatic that cookie cake tastes a hundred times better than individual cookies?"

She merely stared at him for a second, body oddly stiff, expression all deer-in-the-headlights. "Um." She swallowed, and his brows gathered into a frown. "We… might have bigger problems."

Damon scoffed. "What could be bigger tha—"

A sudden, piercing, ear-splitting screech filled the air, slicing right through his sentence and causing both him and Stefan to sit up in alarm. Bonnie's eyes fell into a wince.

"What the _hell_ was—"

Caroline Tasmanian-deviled out of the bathroom in a hyperventilating whirlwind of panic, hands in her hair and eyes roving around the apartment. "This can't be happening, this can't be happening, this can't be happeni—"

Bonnie immediately strode toward her and pulled her into her arms, her own expression vaguely panicked, and began stroking her hair. "Shhh, shhh, it's oka—"

"It's not okay," Caroline cried out in a choked voice, a sob threatening it's way out of her throat.

Damon shot a bemused look at Stefan, and the latter rose to his feet and took a cautious step forward. "Hey," he began tentatively, "everything alri—"

"Do not _dare_ ," Caroline seethed in a venomous voice, head snapping up from Bonnie's shoulder to look at him, "ask me if everything is alright right now."

Damon let out a low whistle, brow arching in a shamelessly intrigued look. "Who needs cable when you have drama like this going on, amirite?"

Something dangerous flashed in Caroline's eyes. "Oh, you think this is entertaining?" She pushed Bonnie aside a bit roughly, taking a threatening step forward that had his brows ticking up in amusement. "You think this is _funny_?"

"I don't even know what 'this' is."

"It's _this_ ," she hissed, pointing a deadly sharp finger at her midsection, gaze wild with emotion. Damon merely stared. A beat passed. He blinked.

"I'm sorry, are you hungry, or—?"

"She's pregnant," Bonnie cut in, head turned away from him.

Caroline's voice shook. "And guess who's Daddy dearest."

A thick silence swallowed the room.

For a minute, nothing happened. No one moved. Caroline stared at Damon. Damon stared at Caroline. Bonnie's head was obscured in her hands. Stefan's gaze slowly panned between the three.

It was Damon who finally broke it with a laugh.

Caroline's eyes blew into spheres of rage. "Are you _kidding_ me?"

He just kept laughing.

"You think that's funny?"

"I think it's _bullshit_."

"Why would I make this up!?"

"No idea, but it's great."

"I AM NOT—"

"Where's the test?" he cut in casually, and she ruffled.

"The what?"

"I'm assuming you took a pregnancy test."

"I threw it out the window!"

He snorted. "Why would you thro—"

"I DON'T KNOW, DAMON, MAYBE BECAUSE IT TOLD ME I WAS FRIGGIN' PREGNANT?"

He reared back at the panic in her voice, face bright with amusement.

"God, I should've known," she scoffed, shaking her head. "I should've known after I missed my last period—"

"You didn't tell me you'd missed a period."

She threw her hands up. "I didn't realize I was supposed to stream a live feed of my fucking menstrual cycle!"

He lapsed into a chuckle. "I mean, when something about it could mean you're pregnant—"

"FINE, FROM NOW I'LL MAKE SURE YOU NEVER MISS AN EPISODE OF 'KEEPING UP WITH CAROLINE'S PERIOD'."

Bonnie burrowed her head further into her hands, shoulders shaking from hidden laughter and body facing away from Damon.

"GOD, why are you _YELLING_ at me? I'm the one with our freaking daughter growing inside me!"

"Who said anything about a—"

"MOTHER'S INTUITION, DAMON, LOOK IT UP, JESUS CHRIST."

He threw his hands up with a laugh. "I'm so lost."

"Let me break it down, then— _you're going to be a dad_."

And suddenly, his face changed.

Blanked.

The confusion, the amusement, the breezy layer of skepticism—it all dimmed into a hollow kind of expressionless that was just subtle enough for no one to really notice.

"—and when Chrysanthemum needs her friggin' _diaper changed_ , or stays up till three AM crying, you're going to have to—"

"Where'd you throw the test?"

The question was quiet but uncannily sharp, and Caroline's eyes flashed in frustration. "I already _told_ you, out the win—"

"Which window?"

"Why does it—"

" _Which fucking window?_ " His lips were pressed together in a hard line as he stared her down. Bonnie's tearily mirthful gaze caught on the look and sobered slightly at the intensity.

"Bathroom window," Caroline hissed, committed to the act, and Damon immediately jerked up to his feet and strode to the bathroom. "Wha—are you seriously going to try and see it in all that snow?"

He pushed past her and disappeared into the bathroom, entirely ignoring her, and Bonnie caught just enough of his unsettling expression to balk slightly. "Care," she murmured, stare fixed on the door, "er, maybe we should—"

Caroline threw a dramatic hand up. "I know you want to help, Bonnie, but Damon _needs_ to accept this on his own! How are we supposed to be a _family_ if—"

"No, Care, I think—" Bonnie jumped a bit when she heard the sound of their rickety bathroom window being wrenched open. What the hell was he doing?

"Whatever!" Caroline snapped. "Let him look! Hopefully he finds it so he can accept the fact that this is happening!" Bonnie ignored her, disappearing after him in the bathroom, and Caroline chose that moment to collapse into a melodramatic pile of limbs on the floor.

A beat of silence.

Then sniffles.

More silence.

Then, "I'm sorry, is this supposed to be for my benefit, or..?"

Caroline's tearful gaze sprang up. "Excuse me?"

"You can drop the act, Streep, Damon's outside."

" _Act_?" she echoed in overdone outrage.

"I mean, for lack of a better word, since calling that acting's kind of a stretch."

Her world-ending angst vanished instantly as she straightened up into a sitting position. "I was the best actress in my class, buddy."

"Yikes."

"Not yikes—I was a theater major."

His brows flew up. "That fact that you graduated college honestly just got a million times more impressive."

She pushed herself up to her feet in indignation and crossed her arms. "How'd you figure out it wasn't real?"

"I think the real question here is how the hell did Damon _not_."

"I was convincing!"

"Chrysanthemum?"

" _That was_ —" she halted suddenly, considering it for a beat. "Okay, that was a little much, but the rest was perfect!"

"Really?" he snorted. "Mother's intuition? Conveniently throwing the test out the window?" He pushed himself out of the chair, expression thoroughly sardonic as he took a step toward her. "Not to mention _silently_ throwing it out of a super noisy window that's almost impossible to open, all in the span of the two seconds that passed between you screeching and coming out here."

She scoffed. "What, are you a detective now?"

He gave an easy shrug. "Lawyer."

"Didn't realize trees needed Sherlock friggin' Holmes defending them."

"They don't—it's for the manatees." She shot him a dry look. "Total disasters in court, can't take them anywhere."

"Hilarious."

"It was also your timing."

"What?"

"That gave you away." Caroline pursed her lips as he drew to a halt in front of her, head cocking to the side. "We start a shitshow last night that Bonnie seems keen on blaming Damon for, and suddenly, the next day, you're pregnant? Should've waited longer."

She slid her gaze over him in a curious once-over, brows drawn. Who knew Justice-for-Whales was such a Slytherin? "So have you just always been this secret schemer?"

His gaze took on a glitter that she wasn't sure she'd ever quite seen on him—at least, not sober him. It was bright. Cocky. "Like I said. Not that nice."

She felt her blood spike with intrigue, and not for the first time, she wondered where the actual _hell_ these inconvenient reactions to him were coming from. When had she started being into Stefan? _Stefan_ , though. Broody, plaid-obsessed, Thoreau-quoting, goody-goody, I-bleed-struggle, save-the-world-from-itself, drowning in righteousness _Stefan_.

She'd felt it last night, she'd _definitely_ felt it this morning, and now here she was, a foot away, itching to grab him by the collar of his stupid flannel and see what other surprises there were to him. Fortunately, a loud _thud_ reverberated from the bathroom before she could see it through, and Stefan's stare shifted over her shoulder. His brow furrowed. "You might want to break the Chrysanthemum news to Damon at some point. Oddly, he doesn't seem to be taking the surprise father thing well."

She sighed, whirling around with an eye roll and trudging toward the bathroom. "He's such a drama queen."

His lips twitched despite themselves at the response.

* * *

"Would you jus—

 _Smack!_

"Damon, I said it was made up!"

 _Smack!_

"It was a prank, you're not going to find anything!"

Damon ignored her completely, jaw clenched as his hands kept tossing aside fistfuls of snow that slapped against the wall of their building. Bonnie had no idea what the hell had come over him. She'd told him it was a joke at least thirty times—she'd told him as he was climbing out the window, as he'd started digging, and yet here he was in the tundra that was their alleyway, five minutes later, stubbornly searching the snow.

A glint of red suddenly caught her eye—blood.

There was blood in the snow. He'd reopened his cut.

"Jesus, Damon, your hand," she growled, pushing herself out of the window with more effort than she cared to admit and landing in the snow with a wet, freezing plop. The cold immediately surged through her body, snow all the way up to her thighs—she was in friggin' slippers and pajama pants, for God's sake—and she clenched her jaw as she forced herself to trudge toward him.

"Hey," she called, reaching a hand out behind him to grab his arm, and he immediately shrugged her off. "Damon!" she tried more forcefully, and this time she grabbed his shoulder and wrenched him around with everything she had. It didn't do much in the way of moving him, but it did finally manage get his attention.

"What?" he snapped, still facing away from her, attention fixed on the snow, and she scoffed.

"Your hand is bleeding, for one!"

She saw him glance down at it for a second before seemingly concluding it didn't matter.

"Two, you're probably three minutes away from getting hypothermia."

He dropped his stare back to the ground, leaning forward to keep digging.

"And three," she growled, forcing herself to wade through more snow till she could turn around and actually face him, "you're looking for something that doesn't exist!"

He ignored her once again, tossing another handful of snow to the side. She reached forward with a bewildered look and shoved his chest, forcing him back up to his full height, and he let out a sudden growl of frustration. "Look, I just _need to fucking know_!" It was a loud, alarming snap, and his eyes finally shot up to meet hers. They were bright and chaotic, unrecognizable as their usual breezy blue. "I need to know for fucking sure that there isn't some piece of plastic out here that says I'm a goddamn father, and if I have to get stitches afterwards, trust me, it's worth the peace of mind!"

She stared at him for a second, his angry breaths coming out in large puffs of smoke in front of him. "I…" she swallowed uncertainly, "Damon, it was a joke. A bad one, I guess, since clearly the idea of kids right now is—

"Right now?" he scoffed, cutting right through her words. "Ever. I don't want kids ever. I don't want fucking kids, I don't want fucking grandkids—I don't want any of it or to even be near any of it so if there's a thousandth of a chance that—"

"There's not," she cut in, shifting her grip up to his shoulders to squeeze them slightly, and something about the decisiveness of the answer seemed to calm him a bit. His chest was rising and falling quickly, turbulent stare fixed on hers, but at the very minimum, he wasn't digging. A flurry of thoughts began spinning through her head as she took in the tense, tightly coiled man in front of her, but one was notably louder than the rest.

His mother must've really done a number on him. It was a sentiment she knew altogether too well.

For a moment, she debated not saying anything. She didn't know him very well, she had no idea if commiserating was his thing—hell, maybe it'd be better to just let him breathe it out, keep her hands tight on his shoulders so he felt her there, felt something stable, leaned toward that instead of toward the panic. She gave it about a minute, watching his tensed breathing with a quiet gaze. And then: "My mom left when I was four."

He didn't react.

She dropped her stare, letting it absently land on the uneven hem of his collar. "I... never really knew why, I mean, my dad mentioned something about it all being too much for her or something, but… for whatever reason," her lips pursed into a vague, resigned line, "I never really knew her."

His stare had averted to the snow, evasive, edgy, but she could tell he was listening—the rhythm of his breathing had eased.

"Honestly, though, I never really knew my dad either." An unexpected chuckle fell from her. "God, that sounds sad. He was just… really distant for most of my life, except for the last few years. Started warming up once I left for college, ironically—guess it finally hit him that he could lose me, too—and then…" she paused, shoulders lifting into a slow, quiet shrug, "he died in a car accident."

His stare lifted up to hers, and after a brief lag, she met it. It was hard to read.

She cleared her throat. "So, um, the point of all of that is that, you know, I think I might get the whole…" she dropped her stare again, "not wanting to be a parent thing. Assuming that's in any way related to your reason." She shot him an awkward smile. "You could just be a weirdo and like really hate kids."

The silence persisted for a few seconds, just the two of them shivering in the dimming dusk, before he finally parted his mouth. "They cry a lot."

Her lips twitched at the welcome glitter of humor. "True."

He sighed slightly. "And they're loud."

She pressed her lips together, giving him a considering nod. "They can be pretty loud."

He frowned suddenly, expression animating, "And they're also like completely useless, they contribute nothing to socie—"

"Can we please go inside now I'm about to die."

His mouth quirked in the beginnings of amusement, waving to the window behind him in an acquiescing gesture. "Ladies first."

She wobbled her way up the steep pile of snow leading to their window in the least lady-like manner ever and clambered back into their apartment. The flush of warmth immediately swelled over her, smacking against her now totally wet clothes, and she had to fight every impulse she had to not rip them off and streak to her room like a psycho.

"Hurry, hurry, hurry," she urged through chattering teeth, jumping up and down and rubbing her hands over her arms as she waited for Damon to finish climbing in. He stepped into the tub beneath the sill and forced the stubborn window down with a sharp yank. "Hallelujah—I'm going to go change."

"Hey," he said, grabbing her elbow as she whirled around to run off, and she shot him an impatient look.

"Freezing here."

"I'm sorry."

"Then let me—"

"About your dad."

She paused, small, shivering body stilling against his fingers.

"And your mom. Just, you know, about your whole…" he waved a vague hand, searching for the words for a second before giving up. "Parents blow."

She stared at him for a beat, eyes a steady, perceptive green, before easing her shoulders into a quiet shrug. "Sometimes."

The answer threw him a bit, but before he could decrypt it, a bright blonde head popped into the room. "Hey, is—" she reared back, face gathering into a scandalized look. "Why are you tracking dirty snow all over my bathtub!?"

Bonnie hopped out of the tub and waved a hand at Damon as she dashed over to her room. "Explain!"

Damon snorted at the speed—she really couldn't handle the cold—before switching his stare to a pointedly glaring Caroline. "We were outside."

"Why?"

"Fresh air's good for your skin."

She considered this for a moment before shrugging—true. "Make sure you clean it up."

"Aye, aye, captain."

She whirled around and disappeared for a few seconds before sticking her head back. "Oh, right, I'm not pregnant, I made that up."

He gave her a thumbs-up.

"Clean the tub."

And then she disappeared again.

* * *

It was officially a miracle.

They had hit the 48-hour mark and everyone was alive. The snow had stopped, every plow in the universe was going to be clearing the streets overnight, and in just 10 short hours, it would officially be a normal weekday morning in the Forbes-Bennett residence.

Caroline was itching to get back to work. She'd ended last week with a bunch of loose ends she'd been ready to tie up on Monday, and they'd been nagging at her the entire two days they'd been stuck. Despite the whole 'wild' perception people seemed to have of her, she was actually pretty addicted to routines—so much so that being in the middle of her nightly grooming process was putting her in a good mood.

She hummed a bit to the song playing as she finished brushing out her hair, eyes roving over the outfit she'd picked for tomorrow. The skirt was meant as a total _fuck you_ to the snow, although… she glanced down at her legs. Goddamnit. She needed to shave.

With a sigh, she dropped the brush and headed over to the bathroom, annoyed to find it steamy and humid—there went her damn hair. Someone must've just finished up a shower. Not wanting to deal with the thick curls of steam coming from the tub, she opted instead for the sink, swinging her leg up and grabbing her shaving stuff from the medicine cabinet.

She'd only just slid her razor halfway up her leg when a sudden shuffle of motion drew her gaze to the door.

"…azor doesn't make you Mother Teresa," Stefan was calling over his shoulder as he waltzed into the bathroom, head angled toward the hallway, grinning and seemingly unaware of her presence. His hair was a wet, tousled mess atop his head, damp skin confirming he'd been the one showering earlier.

And, you know, the fact that he was only wearing a towel.

The yellow terrycloth hung low around his hips, giving way to a water-sheened torso so jaggedly defined that an immediate jolt of irritation shot through her. What the hell kind of tree hugger had that body? But actually, though. Like, she'd gotten a hint that there was more going on than she'd given him credit for when he'd been all up close and personal earlier, but this was a whole new level of no.

"That's my towel."

His head whipped around to identify the voice. "Oh, hey," he said, surprise bright in his voice, and his gaze seemed to snag on her propped, bare leg for a moment before shifting back up. "Sorry, didn't realize you were—"

"Whatever," Caroline said in dismissive response, stare returning to the mirror, "just throw it in the laundry pile when you're done."

"Sure," he said, and for a moment he just stood there, as if unsure what to do. She merely continued shaving her calf, ignoring him entirely, and he brought an awkward hand up to scratch the back of his head. "'Kay, well I'll just let you fini—"

"Don't be stupid, there's four people and one bathroom," she cut in, meeting his stare through the mirror. "If you need the sink, I can share."

He responded with a lifted brow. "That's new."

"How is that new? I share things all the time."

"Right, like that time I used your blender and you told me you were going to puree my hand?"

"You put it back in the wrong cabinet."

"And that logically leads to dismemberment."

Her eyes narrowed. "Do you need the sink or not?"

He held her frosty stare for a moment before dropping it to the disposable razor in his hand. "Well, yeah, actually, I do."

She wordlessly scooted to the side, pivoting around the sink so that her leg was now draped over the right side of it, and he pressed his lips together in a flat smile before moving in to the spot she'd vacated. The warmth of him so close was subtle but familiar, low heat radiating off the vast expanse of damp, tanned skin looming beside her, and she had to dismiss the sudden impulse to touch him.

This cabin fever was really starting to get to her.

"Nice razor," she said off-handedly, flicking her gaze up from her leg to shoot the hot pink plastic a brief glance. "Really suits you."

He scoffed as he flipped open the faucet. "Too bad about two billion of these things clog up U.S. landfills every year." Her eyes immediately veered ceiling-ward. "Disposable razors are a carbon footprint nightmare."

"Yeah, well, they're also the only reason you get to shave before work tomorrow, so." She shot him a humorless smile. "Guess they're not all bad."

He sighed as he ran the razor under warm water, recognizing the futility of any kind of response, and she dropped her attention back to shaving her legs, nearly done with the first one. After a moment, however, she noticed him glancing around. "Do you know where Bonnie keeps her shaving cream?"

She grabbed the can already on the sink and held it out to him. "Just use mine." His brow furrowed at the offering, prompting hers to raise. "What?"

"Is this you trying to drive the whole sharing thing home, or—"

"Yes, Stefan, because I put _so much value_ in whether you think I can share or not." She shook the can impatiently and he took it.

"Thanks."

She ignored the comment and finished up her right leg, tapping the razor against the sink to clear it before running it under the water. It wasn't until she'd switched legs and needed the shaving cream herself that she realized he wasn't done with it—in fact, he hadn't even started using it yet. He was reading the back. "What are you doing?"

"Just checking out the ingredients list," he murmured distractedly, face drawn into an assessing look, and she stared at him.

"You're joking."

"No, actually," he said, stare fixed on the back, "there's this ketone a lot of shaving cream companies have started using that's absolute hell on the ozone layer when it radicalizes, so I just wanted to check i—"

Before he'd even processed her moving, she'd plucked the can out of his hand, held it up, and spread a giant, fluffy smear of shaving cream right across his face. He merely blinked for a moment, newly empty hand still suspended in front of him, before slowly sliding his stare over to hers.

She held it for a solid beat.

"Really."

A snort burst from her before she could help it.

"Really, though?"

Her shoulders began shaking as she lapsed into full laughter, the sound brighter than he'd noticed, bubblier, infectious, and despite himself, the corners of his mouth began to twitch.

"You look," she managed between hitching breaths, eyes bright with mirth at the puff of shaving cream dashed across his nose, "s-so stupid."

"Funny," he drawled, glancing down at the can, "so do you."

And before she could react, he snatched it back from her and slashed a diagonal line across _her_ face, drawing a sharp gasp that cut right through the laughter. She merely stood there for a moment, briefly frozen, before her steely blue gaze slowly flickered open, white froth coating the left fan of eyelashes.

"You have no idea what you just started."

A deadpan stare met hers. "Think I do."

Her stare snapped down to the can, and this time, he was ready: the second her hand shot out he thrust it up in the air and held it out of reach. His face took on a mock-thoughtful expression as she growled, attempting to jump up and swipe it away. "This feels familiar."

She scoffed. "Oh, so _that_ part of the night, you remember—convenient memory."

"I remember all of it."

"Except for," she gritted her teeth as she missed another swipe, causing his lips to quirk in amusement, "the failed makeout attempt."

"You know, I'm actually starting to think you wanted me to kiss you," he said, stumbling back a step as she grabbed his shoulder and pushed against it for leverage.

"Oh, you freaking wish." He dropped his hand just as she made another swipe and got a smear of shaving cream on her shoulder, causing her to squawk in outrage. " _You are so dea—"_

A sudden lurch forward cut her off as her foot skidded against the puddle forming around him, causing her body to fall against his in a slippery, unbalanced stagger. Her hands instinctively went for his shoulders as his shot down to her waist to try and steady her, and it took her a flustered moment regain her footing.

His skin was warm. His grip was snug around her waist. His frame tall, hard—bare against the digging grip of her fingers. Her knees were bent and jutting against his, cheek brushed up against his chest, and the smell of fresh soap radiating from his skin was sharp and overwhelming.

"You okay?"

She cleared her throat, straightening her body up to her full height and tossing her hair out of her face to meet his stare. His face was skitteringly close, body hovering inches from hers, and the heat was tangible. "I'm fi—"

A yelp sliced through as she slipped again. This time his grip shot to the small of her back and pushed her into him, holding her up against him in the world's most uncoordinated hug. Her hands were clinging tight against his shoulders, elbows caught between her chest and his, and when she glanced up, her forehead brushed against his chin.

He was staring down at her with vaguely amused expression. She imagined how dumb she must've looked, caught in his arms like some damsel with shaving cream all over her face, and the irritation was a welcome distraction from the buzz starting to texture her blood. "You can let go now."

His lips quirked. "You sure?"

"Yes."

"Wouldn't want you to swoo—I mean, slip—again."

"Oh, dream _on_ , Captain Planet."

"Fine."

He loosened his grip for barely half a second and she inhaled sharply as her footing gave, causing his arms to lock right back around her and ease her against him yet again. She heaved an angry sigh, blowing her hair out of her face and tossing a withering glare up at him. It was supposed to distract her from the warm friction of his damp skin dragging against hers. It didn't.

"You should probably learn how to stand."

"You should probably learn how to dry your hair."

His lips quirked. "And use up another one of your precious towels?"

"Or use the one you've already infected."

"Infected? What am I, an STI?"

"Mmm, no," she mused, "those require having any actual sex."

His stare took on a glint. "You seem awfully concerned with my sex life."

"How am I awfully concerned with your sex life?"

He shrugged, and she ignored the way it slid his warm skin against hers. "You wanted to know if Bonnie and I had hooked up—"

She scoffed. "That was obviously a joke."

"—and you kept insisting that I hit on you last night—"

"'Cause you kept denying it."

"—and you jumped at the chance to push me up against a door this morning—"

"In demonstration of what _you_ did the night before."

"—and now you're draped all over me-"

"You mean clinging on for dear life because you don't know how to use a towel?"

"—telling me I don't have enough sex—"

"Also, you're literally holding me here in a death grip?"

"—and it all seems kind of connected, in fact—"

"Like I couldn't let go if I wanted."

"—think the only logical conclusion here is that you're trying to have sex with me." Her brows arched sharply at the claim, stare bright with disbelief. He looked totally serious, his countenance even and reflective, face hovering right above hers, and for a second, she was convinced that's what he actually thought. The beat passed, however, and his gaze took on a slow, mocking glint. _"_ Isn't it fun when people assign you motives based on subjective interpretation?"

Her disbelief melted, giving way to annoyance. "Not the same thing."

"Totally the same thing."

"No, actually, because you were intoxicated as hell and don't remember vs. I—"

"I remember everything."

"Oh my God _,_ you know what? I don't even care anymore, just dry your stupid hai—" a yelp cut through her words as she stupidly, for the fourth friggin' time in a row, shoved her way out of his grip and ended up slipping like a moron. The only difference was this time, rather than catching his shoulders for balance, her left hand missed and skidded down his chest, frantically groping for any kind of leverage, and by the time he'd stabilized her against him, it'd ended up curled around the edge of his towel.

It was immediate, the shift.

One unexpected brush of her knuckles against his hipbone, of her cool fingers against the hyper-responsive skin just above the now dangerously low fold of the yellow terrycloth, and his eyes bloomed a dark, suddenly humorless green. The curl loosened from his mouth. The frothy irony slipped off his face, melting into something thicker, hotter. A few inches lower and her hand would be where she could tell his nerve endings wanted it to be.

She felt the beginnings of arousal setting in at the look—the jumping pulse, the thickening throat, the warmth between her legs—and when his stare slid down to her mouth, mere inches from his, instinct told her to move forward and finally close the gap. Tangle herself in him. Unravel him. Get her fingers on every self-righteous, obnoxious, sanctimonious thread of him and pull until he was a wordless mess beneath her.

And yet she didn't move.

…

Why wasn't she moving?

 _Go,_ _Caroline_ , she snapped at herself, fingers curled around the towel, hips snug against his. What the hell was this? Since when did she fucking hesitate when she wanted something? She'd had a nagging desire to get him out of her system all day, and now that she had him molten against her, she was stalling?

Something strange was running in her veins. Something anxious, something like a warning, and whatever it was paralyzed her long enough for him to blink, clear his throat, and snap back into a semi-functional state. "Right, so," he muttered, voice thick, and the sound had her draw instinctively back just as he eased his own step away. His stabilizing hands switched back to her sides, the touch lighter, more hesitant, and he arched a brow in question. "You good?"

"Yep," came the reply, her stare looking anywhere but his, and after a cautious second, he lifted his hands away from her entirely.

She tried to ignore the whine of her deserted skin, swallowing the lingering thickness in her throat. "Look at that—still upright."

His lips lifted distractedly, eyes still dark. "Baby steps."

She continued to avoid his gaze for a bit, running a fidgety hand through her hair, and her gaze caught on the can of shaving cream on the floor. She nodded at it. "You dropped your assault weapon."

His stare followed the line of hers as he readjusted his towel. "You mean your assault weapon?"

"You're right, it's a stolen assault weapon, even worse," she said, still feeling a bit awkward, and she glanced up at him just as his stare returned to hers. "How much time do you get for that, law school?"

"Hm—stolen shaving cream bottle, crime of passion, retaliatory… I'd say…" he pretended to work out the math in his head, brow furrowing slightly, "life." He shrugged. "But only because capital punishment is unconstitutional in Massachusetts."

"Mm."

He smiled a bit uncomfortably, the stiltedness thick in the room, and for a second, they both seemed to hesitantly linger in the tension of the moment.

"So," he said, breaking the silence as he bent over and swiped up the abandoned shaving cream can, "the good news is your shaving cream is ketone-free." He straightened back up and waggled it slightly, and the comment was just annoyingly Stefan enough to snap her out of her weirdness.

"The bad news is," she plucked it out of his hand, "I would've used it even if it wasn't." She shot him a cool smile before whirling around and heading back over to the sink, careful not to slip on anymore rogue puddles along the way.

She caught a flash of his eye-roll in the mirror before he turned around a grabbed a hand towel from the rack, lifting it up and toweling his hair off. She spread a line of shaving cream down her leg and attempted to focus on that, but his torso was friggin' _rippling_ in the mirror as his hand worked into his hair. She thought she was in the clear when he eased around to grab something, facing away from the mirror, but then it was all tectonic back muscles and broad shoulders and goddamnit what the hell was even— "You know what," she said suddenly, dropping the razor, "I'm just going to finish this tomorrow."

He glanced over his shoulder, brow lifting, and she hurriedly rinsed the rest of the shaving cream off. "You sure?"

"Yep, just got super tired, so," she shrugged as she dropped her leg to the ground, "off to bed. Night."

"Hey, for what it's worth, thanks," he said as she headed for the door, "I know this hasn't been the greatest situation, but I have a super early morning tomorrow so as of now, I'm officially out of your hair."

Something about the words struck her, and she paused at the doorframe. She turned to look at him, and he seemed to take her pause as relief, 'cause he shrugged. "You're officially Stefan and Damon free." His mouth tipped into a lopsided tilt. "How does it feel?"

Tonight was their last trapped night. The last time they'd be in this kind of situation. The last time they were in extenuating circumstances that blurred the line between what would normally happen and what wouldn't. What could happen and what couldn't. What _mattered_ if it happened and what didn't.

The last night to do anything about this impulse and chalk it up to circumstance.

But more so than that, since _when the hell_ did she stop herself from doing what she wanted?

None of this mattered.

The who and why didn't matter.

The when didn't even matter.

 _Fuck_ this shit—she was Caroline Forbes.

She dropped her hand from the doorway and strode over to him, "It feels like I just need to—" her mouth was on his in a rush of heat, hands sliding around his neck to pull him into her as his surprised body stiffened beneath her. She didn't feel anything at first—his lips were slow to react against the hot, hungry bite of hers, seemingly in something of a daze—and for a moment, she wanted to laugh.

This was what she'd been hesitating to do? Like it was venturing into some dangerous territory or something? _Please_. She'd had way hotter kisses before, and they'd never come with random warning bells. See? Her caution had been pointless. Stupid brain. What even.

And then he started kissing her back.

It was subtle, at first, the shift: his stiff shoulders eased beneath her arms, lips parting slightly against the onslaught of hers. Then came his hands—an abandoned rag hit the floor as his arms eased around her waist, one large, finger-splayed grip spanning the small of her back as the other slipped up to cup her neck. His mouth slowly started growing hungrier on hers, lips parting and tongues slipping, his hand pulling her body the rest of the way against his, and then…

Well.

 _Then,_ some unidentified amount of time later, she somehow found herself up against the wall, legs wrapped around his waist, hair a messy blonde fistful in his hand, his towel barely hanging onto his hips as he kissed her in a slow, hard, meltingly hot charge of pure heat. Her blood felt electric, magnetized, every grind of her hips against his sending a skitter down her spine, and while all of that was surprising, given who she was with, none of it was unprecedented yet.

None of it freaked her out.

None of it justified her weird hesitation from earlier.

What _did_ was when he finally pulled away. It was a quick movement, a sudden breaking of an otherwise meltingly slow kiss, and when her eyes fluttered open in surprise, he was staring at her. It wasn't a hungry stare, or a lusty stare: it was assessing. Incisive. Exposing.

And it threw the _hell_ out of her.

She immediately felt weirdly vulnerable. Her pulse, luxuriating and slow while he'd been kissing her, spiked into an uneven staccato, and she felt her defenses scrambling to lock into place around her. What the hell was he doing? Why was he looking at her like that, like she was some case file? What the hell kind of straight guy spent God knows how long grinding a girl into a wall and drew back with that fucking _look_?

"What?" she said, throaty voice meant to come out snappy but instead sounding infuriatingly off-kilter.

"What is this?"

She was too tense to delight in how gravelly of a murmur it was. "What's what?"

His eyes were mirrors. "This."

She forced out a scoff. "What makes you think it's something?"

"Nothing, actually, which is why I don't get what's happening."

"Relax, drama queen, I just," she cleared her throat, lifting a shoulder up in a half-shrug, "needed to, you know, get that out of my system."

His eyes narrowed the slightest bit at the answer, puzzling over it, before sliding back down to her mouth. It was a slow descent that had her skin instinctively heating in anticipation, despite how skittish she felt. "And did you?"

She forced a cool smile. "Yep."

He cocked his head to the side slightly, as if measuring her answer. "Huh."

"All gone."

"Great."

"Yep."

Jesus, what _was_ this? She had the sudden need to be on her own two feet, to not be wrapped around him anymore, to not have him invading her space like the over-analytical-asshole-who-assigned-meaning-to-everything that he was, and as if sensing this, he backed up a step and eased her down from him. She immediately slipped out of his grip and pushed past him, running a hand through her hair as she headed for the door. "'Kay, well, good riddance."

She went straight for her room without waiting for a reply, fingers clenched into loose, unconscious fists and shoulders slightly rigid. She closed the door behind her and went straight to her bed, rolling her shoulders and shaking her head to cast off the jittery feeling.

What the _hell_ , though. What had just happened? And why was she so bothered by it? It hadn't been anything that weird, either, just Stefan being Stefan, like? Irritated, she cast the thought aside and threw a pillow over her head, forcing herself to go to sleep without realizing that was precisely what had bothered her.

Stefan being Stefan.

Because over the past two years, every guy she'd hooked up with stopped being anything other than a warm body the second her mouth was on theirs. Stares glazed, bodies moved, pulses shivered, and names, without fail, disappeared—it always became a raw moment of skin on skin.

And yet, when she'd opened her eyes, it wasn't to some blur of heat.

It was Stefan.

It'd been Stefan the whole time.

And that unsettled her, because it meant that for the first time in years, she hadn't been some nameless blur, either.

She'd been Caroline.

 **A/N:** Longest chapter yet for the longest wait! WOOT. This took foreveeeeer. Updates should get more frequent once my finals are over next week, but HALLELUJAH THIS IS OUT. It was all written very piecemeal so hopefully the flow works - I worked in a few more canon things here (LOOOOOL this is my version of Caroline's pregnancy), so I want to see if you guys caught them! Let me know how it's feelin' so I have a sense of where the characters are at for you, 'cause I'm a little addled right now with all the studying. But yay Baroline! Bonnie backstory! Bamon bonding! Defan bickering! Steroline SEXY TIMEZ. And for the record, everyone's dead wrong about the snowfall being over, but given the title of the story, I'm sure you knew that ;)


	7. Flow Resonant

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Seven: Flow Resonant_

* * *

"Bon."

There was a light nudge.

Then a less light one.

" _Mrmph,_ " came the sleepy groan, and after a moment, a heavy-lidded green eye cracked open to a shadowed figure staring back in the darkness, outlined only by the faint light spilling in from the hallway. "Jesus, Stefan, serial killer much?"

"We have a problem."

"Keep waking me up like this and we're going to." Her brow furrowed suddenly, hand slipping up to rub her eyes. "Weren't you heading out like super early today?"

"Yep."

"And?"

" _And_ ," he echoed, heading over to her window and pulling the curtains open with a flat, unceremonious flourish, "we have a problem."

Bonnie squinted in the darkness, unable to make anything out. "I don't see anything."

"Guess that's what happens when your window's behind a wall of snow."

Her eyes sharpened, sleepy stupor loosening its hold on her cognitive functioning. "What?"

"Apparently a blizzard hit at 2 AM last night," he said in a falsely cheerful voice, leaning back against the window frame, "which stopped the big cleanup midway through, which means that all the snow pushed off the road never got moved, which means that all the new snow just piled on top of all the old snow, which means we are literally," he gestured to her window, "snow fortressed in here for the indefinite future, and I'm putting our survival odds at around," his eyes fell into a thoughtful squint, "10%."

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on," Bonnie said, struggling to process what she was hearing as she propped herself up, "you mean we're still stuck today?"

"Oh, not at all," he said pleasantly. "I mean we're stuck all week."

She rocketed up to a sitting position. " _What_?"

" _Wow_ , loud," a drowsy Caroline muttered from the hallway as she passed the door. "Morning voice, banshee." Her eyes briefly flickered into the room and caught on Stefan, prompting her to slow to a halt. "What are you still doing here?"

His brows ticked upward. "That's one way to say good morning."

"What's he still doing here?" she asked Bonnie, thrusting an irritated thumb in his direction, and he shrugged.

"I'd get used to it if I were you."

"Am I talking to you?"

"You're pointing at me."

" _Bon_ , explain."

"I… don't even—" Bonnie shook her head, mind still reeling from trying to process their new situation, and Stefan's eyes veered skyward.

"Snowed all night, snowing all week, probably stuck till Sunday, lot more Damon, lot more Stefan, lot less food, and a lot higher chance of fatalities." He dropped his gaze down to hers, mouth taking on a sarcastic tilt. "Saddle up."

She shook her head briefly as if trying to clear it, lips thinning into a mirthless smile. "That's—" she raised a hand, lapsing into a low, dangerous chuckle, "—no."

"No?"

"No."

"Didn't realize the weather was a yes-or-no question," he mused, frowning thoughtfully before knocking his head toward the window. "Better let it know."

"Stefan," Bonnie said irritably—now wasn't the time for him to be a shithead—but Caroline didn't seem to care, too fixated on blustering over to the window in horror.

"No," she chorused, "no, no, _no_!" She brought her hands up and banged against the glass, breaking up some of the snow so that it tumbled down the mountain below it in a mini-avalanche. Her face collapsed in misery at the sliver of view left in its wake. Snow. Snow _everywhere_. "That is not supposed to be there!" She whirled around in a dramatic flare of blonde and scowled at Stefan. "Neither are you!"

"Weird, it's almost like the two things are related."

Bonnie pinched her nose. "Guys—"

"All this screaming and moaning'd better be coming from some kind of orgy, otherwise I'm going to be _real_ disappointed," a throaty voice rumbled down the hall, and after a few seconds, a shirtless, tousled-haired Damon skulked into view. He slid his half-lidded stare across the room, took in everyone's tense, fully clothed state, and lifted a finger up to his flat expression. "This is my disappointed face."

"We're _stuck_ ," Caroline spat.

"Yeah, hi, we all knew that."

"No, like we're _still_ stuck."

He shrugged. "Eh, what's another day among friends?"

"Try four," Bonnie countered, massaging her temple, and Damon paused.

"Four days?"

"Yep," Stefan said.

"Four _more_ days?"

"That's what the news is saying."

He processed this in surprised silence for a few seconds before lapsing into a low chuckle. "Yeah, this is going to get ugly."

"No," Bonnie said, dropping her hand and forcing herself to sit up straight—enough with the dramatics. "No, it's not, we can figure this out, we just… need to strategize."

"Sweet—you and Stefan grab the snow from behind, Caroline can be the distraction, and then I'll come in and beat the shit out of it."

"Stef, you learned how to ration during your whole wilderness camp counselor phase, right?" she asked, as if Damon hadn't even spoken, and Stefan shrugged.

"Sort of."

"Can you take a stab at what we have and see if there's a way to get it to last us four days?"

"Sure."

"Great—Care," she stifled a yawn, "can you come up with some kind of shower schedule?"

Caroline ruffled theatrically. "I need to shower on a _schedule_ in my own apartment?"

"Look, I'm just trying to preempt things," Bonnie said, tone vaguely harassed, "and constant bathroom run-ins _kinda_ seem like they could spark tension."

"Yeah, Caroline, don't you want to avoid tense bathroom run-ins?" Stefan mused, the very picture of casual, and her eyes thinned into slits.

"Consider it done."

Bonnie rubbed at her eyes. "Awesome, so—"

"Not to be the diva of the group," Damon interjected, propped against the doorframe and squinting at a blown up poster of a kidney taped on the wall, "but motion to revisit the topic of sleeping arrangements?"

Bonnie's eyes flashed into a roll. "Damon—"

"Ah, ah, ah, prudey, let me clarify: this has zero to do with trying to get into your sweatpants and everything to do with basic human rights," he said, swinging his gaze over to hers. "Two days on a old, lumpy couch is one thing, but six?" He clucked his tongue. "Verging on hostage abuse."

"It's not old and lumpy, it's shabby chic," Caroline muttered, and Damon lifted a hand.

"Whatever; uncomfortable."

"Damon has a point," Bonnie said, chewing her lip in consideration, and he slid Caroline a smug look.

"The smart one agrees with me."

"We can rotate."

" _What_?" Caroline choked out, stare flying over to Bonnie in horror.

"The beds—we can switch off every other day so that everyone can get at least two good nights in," she explained, and Caroline let out a bright laugh.

"There is _no_ chance I'm giving up not only my space, my privacy, my food, my sanity, and my shower time, _but also my bed,_ " she snapped, and Damon snorted.

"Newsflash, Goldilocks, we didn't ask to be in this situation."

" _Newsflash_ , bucko, you were cuter when you didn't talk."

"Hey, enough—Care, Stefan and Damon have it worse than we do," Bonnie said, tired voice sharpening into her done-playing-games mode. "They don't even have any of their stuff, like at least we're home. Damon, it's still nice of Caroline to give up her bed so maybe don't be such an entitled asshat about it?"

Damon arched a brow. "Alright, mom." He glanced at Caroline and nodded his head toward Bonnie. "Does she do that a lot?"

"All the friggin' time."

"It's kind of annoying?"

" _So_ annoying."

"But also kind of hot?"

"True."

Bonnie rolled her eyes at the exchange. "Stefan, you can switch with me—"

"Oh, don't worry about it," Stefan interjected, waving her off, "I'm fine with the couch."

Bonnie's mouth parted in protest but Caroline's pronounced snort beat her to it. "Of _course_ you're fine with the couch."

He arched a brow. "Is that problem?"

"Oh, not at all—Saint Stefan, everyone," she said, gesturing at him in introduction. "He'll be blessing blind infants at noon."

"I'm sorry, are you _actually_ finding a way to get mad at the fact that I'm helping you keep your bed?"

She scoffed. "Oh, so this is for my benefit?"

"I mean, indirectly, sure."

"Wow, so gallant, so selfless. You're really considerate, it's amazing."

Stefan blinked at her in abject confusion. "You can't just say good things like they're bad things and expect people to understand you."

"You're right," she said sweetly, and Stefan switched his stare to Bonnie and lifted his hands up in askance.

"Here's what I think," Damon said, clapping his hands together, "you two still give your beds up every other night, but instead of Stefan taking one, we stagger it so that I can use his turns, too."

Caroline's brows flew up. "So you get a bed for all four nights?"

Damon rolled his eyes. "Well, when you put it that way."

"We're all switching, it's the fair thing to do, case-closed," Bonnie said, powering through another yawn. "Anything else we need to iron out?"

"Extended power outages," Stefan offered, and Bonnie waved a tired hand.

"Cross that bridge when we get there."

" _Whoooa_ , taking a walk on the wild side," Damon drawled, waggling his brows at Bonnie, and she held up a sarcastic thumbs up in response.

"Alright, well I'll go get a jump on the food inventory," Stefan said, pushing off the window frame and slipping into the hallway.

"I'll draft up the schedules," Caroline grumbled, begrudgingly following suit.

"I'm going back to sleep," Bonnie said, hands meeting over her head in a deep stretch.

"What?" Caroline said, stopping in her tracks to snap her gaze back over to Bonnie. "But there's so much to do!"

Bonnie merely shrugged, falling back into her bed and pulling the covers over her. "Then there'll still be stuff to do later."

"Bonnie!"

"Caroline, it's 6 AM, let me live," she groaned, and Damon smirked at the stubborn lump of blankets.

"We've got a big morning fan over here."

"Byeeeeee, everyone."

"Interested in being tucked in?"

"Byeeeeeee, Damon."

"I'm excellent with bedtime stories." At her sleepy silence, he thrust a thumb in her direction and whirled back into the hall. "She has the right idea—night, kids."

"You, too?" Caroline squawked, as if the idea of going back to bed at 6 AM when you had pretty much nothing but time to kill was preposterous, and he merely yawned in response as he walked toward her room. "Uh, where do you think you're going?"

"Your bed," he drawled without bothering to glance back, pushing her door open, "which is technically now my bed for the day. Switchsies!"

The door swung shut behind him with a flippant smack.

Caroline pressed her lips together in a thin line, inhaling deeply and forcing herself to swallow her response. Stefan's brow ticked upward—it was like watching a bomb change its mind mid-detonation. Her gaze sensed his after a beat and zipped up to meet it. " _What_?"

"What?"

"You're looking at me."

"You're the only person here."

"Well, go somewhere else, then."

He snorted, palms lifting in mock-surrender as he veered around and headed toward the kitchen: it was clear last night hadn't had the slightest effect on her general animosity level. He hadn't really expected it to, particularly given how agitated she'd seemed toward the end, but it was still baffling to him that she could go from complete disdain to making out against a bathroom wall to complete disdain without batting an eyelash.

It just seemed so foreign to him. He'd never been able to compartmentalize physical from emotional that much—even in the scattered hookups he'd had between relationships. Granted, he hadn't exactly pushed her away yesterday, so maybe he was better at it than he thought, but even last night there'd been something drawing him in—something more than just the legs and the hair and the hot mouth on his.

It was the lure of excavation. Of testing a theory. Of slipping past the guillotine stare and lacerative tongue and teasing something else out, something rawer, softer, less polished. He wanted to burn through the layer of manufactured indifference and see what was under it—slide a finger down the spine of what he suspected was a costume till he found a seam. He wanted a glimpse of something real.

Or at least, that's how it'd started off. His train of thought had hit a ten-car pileup somewhere between her teeth finding his ear and her ankles guiding his hips against hers, but the point was there'd been a pull on his end. On her end, it seemed like borderline sociopathy—a fleeting, emotionless interest that came and went with all the consequence of a sneeze. That's how she played it, anyway. He wasn't sure he believed her, but at this point, he also wasn't sure he cared to find out. Seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

As if to confirm this, a scoff sounded from behind him just as he switched on the coffeemaker, and he glanced over his shoulder to the image of her cross-armed in the doorway. "Sure, help yourself," she said, gesturing at the coffeemaker.

He snorted. Really? She was really going to pretend that him making coffee was some presumptuous overstep when he'd watched her guzzle the stuff like water over the past few days? It was the type of textbook Caroline turn-a-good-thing-into-a-bad-thing comment he typically brushed off, since it was so transparent, but something about how extra bitchy she was being in the wake of last night had him feeling pettier than usual.

"Oh, sorry—here, let me put it all back," he said in mock-earnestness, easing back around and switching the machine off. He'd barely opened the lid when he heard her coming up behind him.

"Just leave it, whatever."

"No, really, I don't want to impose anymore than I already have," he continued, all deadpan somberness and deference, pulling out the filter with the ground coffee and setting it on the counter as he reached for the coffee tin. "I'm sure you have some way of doing this that I'm messing u—"

" _Just_ —" she cut in, her hand catching his before he could dump the coffee grounds back into the tin and stilling it, "—forget it, it's fine."

His stare slid sideways and landed on hers. She was hovering slightly behind him, a foot or so away, the window behind her outlining her in the beginnings of the morning sun. Her hair caught the light in a bright, wild halo, contrasting starkly with the darkness of her shadowed features, and for a second, his focus snagged on how entirely… _young_ she looked.

Fresh, unadorned, innocent—a girlish sort of beauty that was at violent odds with the manicured, vixeny vibe he'd come to associate her with. The Caroline Forbes he knew was always dolled up, even in the mornings, but today he seemed to have caught her early enough to glimpse the 'before' shot. It was… endearing. A disheveled ring of golden hair, a giant T-shirt, a sleepy scowl, and—his eyes squinted slightly—freckles. She had a small smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

He'd never noticed.

"Admit that you actually want me to make it."

She immediately scoffed. "What?"

"Think it goes more like 'Stefan, I would love for you to make some coffee since, despite my inexplicable need to demonize everything you do, it's a nice thing that benefits everyone'."

She parted her mouth in what looked like preparation to snap out some eviscerating defense, though after a second, paused. And dropped a dark glance at the coffeemaker. And deliberated. And finally, sighed: "Stefan, please make the coffee."

There was that trusty caffeine addiction.

His eyes thinned to a squint, hand lifting up into a rolling gesture. "…since it's actually a nice thing that benefits eve—"

"Don't push it."

His stare swung back to hers with a subtly amused glitter. "You're horrible at repeating things."

"And you're horrible at making coffee quickly."

His eyes took on a keen quality. "Pretty addicted there, aren't you?"

"What's it to you?"

"Power, actually," he said, leaning back against the counter, "since I'm literally the only thing standing between you and your fix."

She lapsed into a snort. "You don't think I can move you?"

"Honestly?" She crossed her arms over her chest with a pointed machine gun of a stare, and he held it for an extended beat. And then, "Probably, 'cause there's a knife about a foot away that I doubt you'd have any qualms using, _but_ consider this," he said, lifting a finger, "stabbing someone's a lot harder than it looks, _and_ if you take the alternate route of just saying 'thanks for doing this nice thing', you get the bonus of not having to make the coffee yourself."

Something bearing a suspicious resemblance to amusement was threatening to creep through the frost in her expression, but she kept it stony. "And how exactly do you know what stabbing someone's like?"

"Camp used to get pretty wild."

She snorted. "You would be a camp kid."

"Counselor, actually."

"Whatever, just…" she heaved an exasperated sigh, pushing her hair out of her face in a way that washed her skin in sunlight, exposing the constellation of freckles to full effect, "what is it that you want me to say again?"

"'Stefan, thanks for doing this nice thing'."

"Fine—'Stefan, thanks for doing this nice thing.' Happy?"

"Very."

"Great."

"Now let's try it all together: 'Stefan, please make the coffee and thanks for—'"

The knife was off the counter and in her hand in a decisive swipe.

His lips twitched, stare glittering in amusement. "Wow."

"Coffee."

He noticed the barest hint of a smile.

"Fine—can I have my hand back?"

She glanced down at where her fingers were still wrapped around his wrist from earlier. "Oh." She pulled back hastily. "Yeah, sorry."

She whirled around and made her way over to the table without another word, movements a little abrupt, and his brow furrowed as he watched her. That was kind of weird. She'd yanked him into an impromptu makeout session less than ten hours ago but holding his wrist made her jumpy? The day Caroline made sense to him would be the day Hell hosted the winter Olympics. He finished setting up the coffeemaker and flicked it on before switching his attention to the cupboard above it, briefly assessing the breakfast options. Unsurprisingly, there were tons of them—Bonnie was the biggest breakfast freak in the known universe. "You hungry?" he directed behind him without much thought, squinting a bit as his gaze reached the top shelf.

Silence met the question, and after a few seconds, he glanced over his shoulder.

She was sitting on the chair with her legs pulled up against her chest, giant T-shirt yanked over the knees so that only her bare feet stuck out. Her arms were circled around her calves, fingers of one hand linked around the wrist of the other, and the childlike position contrasted starkly with the sharpness of her expression. Guess she was back to her usual Arctic climate.

"Is that a no?"

"I don't do breakfast."

His stare grew impatient. "So is that a no?"

"Yeah, that's a no."

"Great," he said, turning back to the cupboard with a vaguely baffled look—add 'breakfast' to the list of things that somehow irritated her. He eventually settled on toast, ironically not much of a breakfast person either, and the coffee finished brewing just as he lathered butter onto the second slice.

The shuffle of her getting up behind him prompted him to wave a hand. "No worries, I've got it." He looped a finger between two mugs and plucked up the coffee pot, carrying them over to the table in one hand and the plate of toast in the other.

She arched a brow as he set a mug down in front of her.

Naturally.

'Cause what else would she do.

He ignored the look and took the adjacent seat, setting everything down and fishing out his phone to check the news. He scrolled for a minute or so, absently pouring himself a cup of coffee, before snagging on a headline that made his brows flick upward. "Jesus. Have you seen the MGH story?"

She took a sip of her coffee. "Haven't checked the news."

"Oh, do you want to?" he asked, absently offering his phone, and the gesture seemed to trigger something because she set her mug down with a sudden sigh.

"Right, let's just get this out there since _clearly_ body language just flies over your head: last night was a one-time thing."

His face immediately gathered into a frown. "What?"

"An isolated incident," she said, waving an impatient hand. "An anomaly, an outlier, not happening agai—"

"Right, I know what 'one-time' means, I just have literally _no_ idea what that has to do with asking you about the news."

"Oh, please," she snorted, shooting him a disbelieving look. "You expect me to believe you're being all friendly because you're just what, in a good mood?"

His stare was blazing with confusion. "Being 'all friendly'?"

Her voice dropped into a mocking baritone. "Hey, want some coffee? Hey, want some breakfast? Hey, need my phone?"

"Hey, that's normal behavior?"

She rolled her eyes. "Whatever, it's actually better this way—gives me a chance to set the record straight now that we're stuck for four more days."

He blinked at her, entirely blindsided. Either she'd only ever had the world's shittiest guys in her life, or she just thought this lowly of him in particular. Probably the second one, honestly, since that seemed like her MO.

"So, are we clear?" she asked, bringing a hand up to inspect her nails, and his stare thinned with bewilderment.

"There's nothing to clear up."

She gave a gusty sigh. "Right, but skipping to the part where you drop the innocent act: are we clear? Same page?"

There was a particular brand of indignation that came along with having someone blithely assign him shitty motives, and it was really starting to heat his blood. Nonetheless, after a moment of deliberation, he forced himself to cast off a rebuttal. It wasn't worth it. Christ, he really needed to stop thinking there was more to her—it'd make moments like this a lot less surprising.

"Earth to Ghand—"

"We're clear, Caroline."

Her brows arched at the terse admission. "You sure?"

"Believe me," he said as he pushed the chair back and swiped up his coffee, sticking the half-eaten piece of toast between his teeth before standing up and grabbing his phone, "it'll be easy. Second slice's for you," he directed over his shoulder through a muffle of bread as he swept out of the kitchen, indicating the abandoned toast on the table.

You know.

As a token of thanks for the quickie he was expecting in the laundry room later.

Jesus.

* * *

 _Bang_!

Bonnie's sleepy gaze flickered open, face pulling into an instinctive grimace at the abundance of sunlight in her room. Really? Why the hell were her curtains open? She could've sworn she'd closed them before she'd gone back to—

 _Bang_!

She jolted slightly, forcing herself up into a sitting position and glancing over her shoulder. The fuzzy image of a tall girl standing on top of her desk chair swam into view, and after a few groggy blinks, so did the giant duster in her hand.

Bonnie immediately groaned.

"Oh, good, you're up," Caroline said, rapt gaze fixed on the shelves above her desk. "Now I don't have to worry about being quiet _."_

"Caroline," she began, bringing a hand up to rub her temple, but Caroline steamrolled onward.

"When was the last time you cleaned this bookshelf, Bon?" She plucked up an old Biochem book and grimaced at the thick coat of dust it was rockin' before flinging it over her shoulder with an unceremonious flick. Ah. The mystery of the 'bangs' unraveled.

"Care, we talked about this," she tried again, trying and failing to stifle a yawn. "You can't just—" another yawn, this one round and luxuriating, "—barge into my room and start cleaning when you're bored."

Caroline scoffed as she stretched to her tiptoes to grab another book. "First of all, there was no barging—the door was basically open—and second of all…" her lip curled in disdain at the coffee stained cover her hand emerged with, "this isn't cleaning. This is neutralizing a biohazard."

Bonnie's eyes veered ceiling-ward. "I'm getting a new roommate."

"God, these aren't even in _alphabetical order_."

"I'm writing the craigslist ad in my head right now."

"Biochem _after_ Cell Bio?"

"Sane female seeks non-obsessive cleaner for inaccessible second floor igloo."

"Were you organizing by semester?"

"I was organizing by whatever order I had the energy to throw them back in after a 30 hour OB shift."

Caroline tossed the book onto the desktop with a baffled look, as if the idea of letting something as silly as 30 hours of no sleep keep her from alphabetizing was preposterous, and Bonnie couldn't help but snort. What even were her friends.

"Did you make coffee already?"

Down went another book. "Stefan did."

Bonnie's eyes lit up. "Really?" Stefan made the most _bomb ass coffee_. Granted, she made relentless fun of him for it because he had actual friggin' books about it like the hipster that he was, but that didn't stop her from shamelessly reaping the benefits. "Did he make it with the vanilla extract?"

Caroline frowned. "How would I know?"

"Uh, did it taste like glory?"

"It tasted like coffee."

Bonnie snorted at the terse response. "Hater."

Caroline shrugged, gaze trained stubbornly forward. "Didn't notice anything special, sorry."

"Apologize to your wronged taste buds— _I'm_ getting some glory coffee." She kicked her blankets off in a sputter of limbs and set off to the door, slipping into her slippers like the grandma she was. "Stefan!" she called out in a dramatic voice. "Caffeinate me!"

"The beast awakens," came the deadpan reply, and Bonnie grinned as she padded into the living room, her hair a wreck of curls atop her head.

"Did you make glory coffee?"

"'Course I did," he said from the couch, eyes trained on whatever he was typing on Caroline's Little Mermaid laptop.

" _Yessssss_."

A few seconds of expectant silence passed, punctuated only by the click of his fingers on the keys, before his lips quirked. "Is loitering your super subtle way of asking me to get you some?"

"It's like you can read my _soul_." He rolled his eyes, finishing up a sentence before casting the laptop to the side. "Remember that Godzilla movie with the robots you made me see—"

"Pacific Rim," he drawled, getting to his feet.

"And the robo-controller people were like flow resonant or whatever—"

"Drift compatible."

"Yeah _,_ that one—that's what we are."

"'Flow resonant,'" he mocked as he swept into the kitchen, snorting at how off it was.

"Hey, I'm pre-coffee, be nice," she said, following behind him and pouring herself into one of the kitchen chairs.

"I worked out the rations, by the way," he said, grabbing a mug off one of the hooks on the wall and setting it down. "I actually think we'll be fine, barring any crazy binges."

"Really?"

"Yeah, you guys have a lot of non-perishable stuff stowed away in your pantry."

"Oh, the cooking stuff," she said mysteriously, like it was some kind of town secret.

He smirked as he poured in the creamer. "Clearly not used often."

" _Hey_ , bucko, I save lives," she said, reaching up to take the steaming mug he was handing her.

"I save planets," he countered smugly, and she scoffed.

"What good's a planet without people?" He arched a disbelieving brow, and she deliberated for a second. "Okay, yeah, it's like way better off— _fine_. You win."

"You're welcome," he said, nodding at the cup in her hands, and she broke into an over-bright, elfin smile that screamed of annoying little sister.

"Thaaaaaanks."

She brought it up to her lips and took a deep sip, the flavor immediately flooding her tongue and drawing her eyes closed. God. Sorcery. It had to be. "I swear to God, if you've been hiding your Hogwarts letter from me since we were eleve—" her words trailed off as her stare snagged on their fridge.

Or more specifically, the elaborate web of pages magnetized to their fridge.

"Um. What's that _?_ "

He followed her gaze to the fridge and, upon identifying the source of her confusion, adopted a dry expression. "Those are Caroline's schedules."

"Schedules?" she echoed, brow furrowing. "Plural?"

"Very plural."

She leaned forward a bit, squinting. "Are those bar graphs?"

"Yep. They have p-values."

She merely stared at them for a second before conceding with a resigned shrug. "Frightening, but not altogether unexpected from the girl currently alphabetizing my desk." She shot him a playful, 'these weirdos we're stuck with amirite?' look, but he brushed it off slightly, turning around to clean up the counter.

Her brow furrowed.

"Hey, uh," she ventured nonchalantly, though she took care to drop her voice a bit, "I've been meaning to ask, but is everything cool with you two?" She took another sip of her coffee, observing his body language from behind. "I mean, I know you aren't exactly besties, but it seemed like there was some extra weirdness going on earlier with the whole 'kiss' debacle, and I just wanted to—"

"It's fine," he said, swinging the cabinet open to put back the sugar. His voice was casual enough, nothing about it raising any flags, though his next words seemed to carry a bit more of a bite: "All cleared up."

Her stare narrowed the slightest bit.

Weird.

Subtle, but weird.

"Alright, well great. Glad to hear it."

He didn't respond, plucking the now empty coffee pot from the machine and bringing it over to the sink. She made an official mental note to keep a probing eye out. On Caroline, too. Who knew if some of that 'boredom' cleaning was stress cleaning?

"You know what I want to do today?" she asked suddenly, gaze taking on a gleam of rebellion that in zero way matched her next sentence. "I want to read a book."

Stefan snorted. "Wild child."

"No, like a _fiction_ book with imaginary characters who go on adventures and fall in love and never mention freaking signaling pathways or single nucleotide polymorphisms," she explained, blowing her coffee slightly to cool it. "Do you know how long it's been since I've been able to read anything that didn't come from a scientific journal?"

"Your life's so sad."

She scoffed. "Whatever, Shark Week."

" _Yo_ ," he said, whirling around from the sink in sudden animation and pointing at her, "mini-marathon today at 8:30—I saw a commercial. Megalodon vs. Hammerhead."

"Is that a pokemon battle?"

"No, but it's just as epic."

"I really need to figure out why I'm still friends with you," she muttered, following the statement with another delicious sip of coffee. "Oh, right." She lifted the mug in indication.

"What're you going to read?" he said, turning back to the dishes, and she shrugged.

"No idea. I'll probably just raid Caroline's library—she has a ton of stuff, being all writery and all." She blew on her coffee again. "Did you know she's a writer?"

"Vaguely."

"Yeah, she doesn't talk about it much."

He set the coffee pot in the drying rack. "She's pretty good."

Her head flew up, gaze flooding with surprise. "She let you read something?"

He snorted, lifting a plate to wash it. "I wouldn't say 'let'—it was part of the whole 'kiss debacle'."

"Oh." She winced, imagining how that must've gone. Caroline was crazy protective about her writing—it'd taken two years before she let Bonnie read any of it. Even now, there were certain things that were off-limits. "That must've gone well."

He shrugged, placing the plate in the drying rack without comment.

She chewed her lip. "Well, if it's any consolation, her territorial thing is nothing personal. She's just, you know…" she waved a vague hand, casting around for the right words to diffuse the tension, though after an extended moment, she merely sighed. "She's defensive about things that make her vulnerable."

His snort was subtle but charged. "Caroline doesn't strike me as a particularly vulnerable person."

Her brows lifted as she eyed her coffee. "You'd be surprised."

"Correct," he said, and something about his blithe tone irked her a bit. "I would be."

"Well, I mean," she ventured mildly, "you don't really know her."

"I think I know enough."

 _Again_ , with the tone.

She pressed her lips together in a thin line, noting not for the first time in the past two years how different Stefan's approach to life had gotten since the Elena thing went down. Half of her childhood memories were of him convincing her to see the best in people, like that time in seventh grade when he'd talked her out of putting gum in Denver Holbrook's hair for making fun of hers by telling her about her parents' divorce.

But now? Now it was like that side of him had shuttered off, like he blamed it for what happened. He used to be one of the most infuriatingly 'two sides to every story' people she knew, and now he was just so much more… cynical. Quick to judge. It wasn't always obvious, but when it was, it bothered her. It just wasn't him.

And incidentally, what he saw wasn't really Caroline.

"I think you're underestimating how much there is to know."

He shrugged. "Maybe."

Her jaw set. "Unless you somehow magically know more about her than I do."

He shot a surprised look over his shoulder, and the wash of amusement in it annoyed her further. "I'm aware you know her better, Bon, I just don't necessarily think knowing her better would make her come across any differently to me. To you, it obviously does," he said, lifting a hand, "and that's great. Like who you like. But just…"

"Just what?"

"Just don't act like I have to understand it," he finished, tone growing a bit exasperated. "Because to be completely honest, I don't."

"Doesn't seem like you're trying particularly hard."

"Doesn't seem like it's particularly worth the effort."

Bonnie set her coffee down with a thinned gaze. "Okay, now you're being an asshole."

He turned from the sink to fully face her, expression bewildered. "I'm being an asshole because I don't like your friend?"

"No, you're being an asshole because you're reducing someone I care about into a two-dimensional impression instead of just acknowledging there are things you don't know."

His palms lifted. "I fully acknowledge there are things that I don't know, but I also don't think it's some weird duty of mine to _have_ to know them." He let out a slight scoff. "And for the record: I'm not reducing her into anything, that's how she presents herself."

Bonnie's eyes narrowed. "And it would be the first time in the history of the planet that someone adopted a hardened persona instead of dealing with being hurt, _right_?"

His mouth opened then closed, the double target of the comment impossible to miss, and Bonnie watched him for a moment before glancing down at her coffee.

Well, great.

She hadn't meant to have _that_ fight with him—not now, anyway. They'd hashed out his personality shift a few times before and it was never an easy conversation. Besides, whatever Caroline had been putting him through lately probably justified more than a little dislike—she knew how she could be—but God, she just hated seeing that side of him.

And she hated Caroline being misinterpreted like that.

It was like a double whammy of things she hated, and it just set her off.

"I—sorry," she said, shaking her head slightly. "I didn't mean to go off on you, I'm just…" she sighed, setting the mug down and slowly getting to her feet, and he watched her with a drawn brow. "Protective, I guess."

He averted his stare. "Got it."

"Okay," she said, bringing her mug up to the sink and washing it briefly as the tension in the room hung around them. He wasn't thrilled with the conversation, she could tell, but there was nothing she could really do about it now, so she set the mug in the drying rack and pushed a hand through her hair. "I'm just… going to go pick out a book."

He nodded and she slipped out of the kitchen, so drawn into her own thoughts that she completely missed the humanoid lump on Caroline's bed as she walked into her room. She sidled up to the immaculate, color-coded bookshelf and sighed, trying to clear her mood. She hated fighting with Stefan. With anyone, really. The lingering tension of it, the sense of heaviness, the drain of time that could've been spent being happy instead—it made her impatient and anxious.

Thoughtlessly, she reached up and slipped a book with a bright blue cover off the shelf purely because it was pretty. 'The Fault in Our Stars'. She'd never heard of it.

"Overrated."

She jolted at the unexpected voice behind her, whipping around to identify the source, and a yawning, half-naked Damon came into view. He was sitting up in Caroline's bed, arms bent back in a luxuriating stretch, hair a rumpled mess atop his head, and Bonnie pressed the book against her heart to steady it.

" _Jesus_ , Damon."

He ignored her, nodding his head at the book. "Douchey teens and tragedy porn—I'd pick something else."

Still annoyed from the scare, she glowered a bit, bringing the book up and flipping it to read the synopsis. After a beat, her brows shot upward. "Damon, they have _cancer_."

"You would think, then, that they wouldn't waste time being so fucking pretentious."

"Wow," she said, though a small part of her had to fight back a laugh at the flippancy. "You're going to Hell."

"Eh," he managed through an indulgent yawn. "Can't be worse than reading a sixteen year old's vehement protest against 'breakfast food exclusivity'."

Her expression grew serious. "This book insults breakfast?"

"Yep."

She scoffed, slipping back onto the shelf without hesitation. "Next."

"Atta girl."

Her brow furrowed as she raked her gaze over the book spines, recognizing little to none of the titles. God, she was out of touch with the literary world. "What about this one?" she said, lifting up a dark book that had 'exhilarating' and 'stays with you forever' written on the spine.

Damon squinted at the cover for a second before lapsing into a chuckle. " _House of Leaves_?"

She frowned. "No good?"

"It's fucking great."

She perked up a bit. "Really?"

"Yeah, you won't be able to sleep for a week."

She let out a fake laugh before shoving the book back into place. Nope. "This one?" She held up a red cover.

"Boring."

Yellow cover.

"Pointless."

Green cover.

"Fuck that guy."

She groaned. "Do you just hate everything?"

He sighed, making a dramatic show of getting to his feet and dragging himself over to her side. Her gaze instinctively flickered down his bare form as he approached, everything about him radiating confidence in his own skin, and she wondered briefly what it was even like in his head. Her best guess was a constant, blasting loop of 'I'm Too Sexy For My Shirt.'

"Alright, what've we got here," he said, lifting an elbow up to lean against the shelf and thinning his gaze into a squint. He dragged it along the top row of books, brows slowly drawing together, and she couldn't help but notice his extravagant series of micro-expressions: a nose twitch, a pursed mouth, a narrowed gaze.

"Crap," he concluded, switching over to the next shelf. His back was to the early noon sun, obstructing the light and casting the front of him in shadow, and for the hell of it, she took a second to observe just how ludicrously pretty he was. Like, he wasn't her type at all—she'd always preferred boyish, unassuming looks—but damn if he hadn't hit some kind of genetic lottery. Even in shadow, his eyes were a jolt of blue, his hair was an effortlessly aesthetic tumble of near-black, and his jaw looked sharp enough to get him stopped by TSA.

"Are you into satire?"

She scrunched her nose. "I mean, I wouldn't throw it a pep rally or anything."

"Ix-nay on the onnegut-Vay. Shakespeare?"

"Was kind of hoping to take a break from archaic language."

He clucked his tongue in disapproval. "Frailty, thy name is woman. Post-modernism?"

She sighed. "Can you just point out a punchy bestseller and call it a day?"

He rolled his eyes, slipping a thick book off the shelf and holding it up to her with a dreary, "Kids these days."

She squinted at the title. "Gone Girl?"

"Soapy murder plots with quality writing."

"Bet it was the gardener."

"No imagination."

She ran her eyes over the jacket summary for a few seconds, her focus still split after her lingering fight with Stefan, before giving a halfhearted shrug. "Sounds good. Thanks."

"No problem."

She tucked it under her arm and stood there for a moment, stare vague and slightly drifty, and he slowly cocked his head to the side. The movement drew her gaze up, and she frowned. "What?"

"Ask your face."

"What's wrong with my face?"

"It's all…" he waved a fluttery, impatient hand, "emo. Which, to be honest, normally I'd ignore, but," he shifted slightly, "you were there for my little freak-out yesterday, so."

She merely stared at him, stifling a snort—was that really supposed to inspire her to open up? Champion speech-giver over here. Besides, even if he actually _wanted_ to hear her out, which clearly he didn't, what kind of insight would she get from Damon of all people? Buy Stefan a lap dance? "Thanks, but it's nothing."

He eyed her for a moment. "You sure?"

"Yeah, I'm just waiting for my coffee to kick in."

"There're only two other people in this obscenely small apartment, kid, and something tells me this involves both of them. Last chance to vent."

"All set." He shrugged, backing away from the bookcase and turning back to the bed, and he got about halfway around before her face crumpled into a quick, hesitant, "It's just—"

His expression flattened, body slowly easing back around to face her and settling into the elbow-propped lean it'd been in earlier.

She chewed her lip, eyes brightening a bit with anxiety—she probably shouldn't do this. Airing out a bunch of emotionally charged frustrations with her best friends to someone she barely knew felt like a bad call. But at the same time, it kind of helped that Damon was essentially a stranger. A stranger who knew enough about both Caroline and Stefan to easily grasp the situation, but not enough for there to be much of a threat of this blowing up in her face.

He arched a brow as she twittered in indecision. "It's just what?"

"Nothing."

His stare veered ceiling-ward. "Witchy."

She heaved an impulsive sigh. "It's just—Stefan and Caroline have been acting like super different people ever since they went through their breakups and I act like I'm fine with it but I'm actually _super_ worried about it and I have no idea how the hell to talk about it with them without pissing them off and it just happened again with Stefan and I _hate_ it."

He blinked at the onslaught. "Okay."

"And it's not even like it's different in a good way or wise way," she pressed on, countenance becoming more blustery as she gained momentum, "it's different in ways that like, insulate them from growing past what happened, and because of that, here we are two years later and neither of them seem anywhere near as over their problems as they pretend to be."

His lips took on a vague purse.

"And the irony is that both of them want nothing more than to distance themselves from their relationships, but honestly, by changing themselves so much in reaction to them they're basically still being defined by them," she said, pushing a wayward curl out of her face. "And that's one thing for Stefan, but it _kills_ me for Caroline because Matt was such a controlling asshole and the last thing she'd ever want to hear is that he's still influencing who she is."

His brow furrowed slightly as he listened, hand lifting to fiddle with the cover of one of the shelved books.

"And in the midst of all of this, I'm just kind of sitting here observing everything and wondering what the hell role I'm supposed to play in it, because if I say something, it could start a fight, but if I _don't_ say anything, I'm kind of enabling it, and I just—" she lifted her hands in a frustrated gesture, pressing her lips together. "I just don't know." Her distracted gaze lingered past his head for a long, conflicted beat before switching up to his. She gave a helpless shrug. "I don't know."

He gave a slight nod, attention diverted to the book he was fiddling with. She waited for some kind of reaction, stare expectant, but all she was met with was casual silence. In fact, if his expression weren't so void of its usual glitter, she would think he hadn't heard a word she'd said.

"So…" she ventured, rocking back on her heels, "thoughts?"

His stare flickered up to hers, seemingly a bit surprised. "Oh, you want advice?"

She frowned. "No, I just told you all of that for silence."

"Hey, sometimes people just want to rant."

"I want to know what you think," she insisted, surprised to find herself hungry for an objective opinion. She'd never really opened up about this to anyone before, and now that she had, she was worried she hadn't been doing enough. That it was screamingly obvious. That she should've stepped in earlier, doled out more tough love, bulldozed through the tension, been a better friend. God, he was definitely going to say—

"Honestly, I think it's kind of infantilizing to assume people aren't aware of their own problems."

Her brows snapped upward in surprise.

 _Wow_.

Okay.

She wasn't expecting that.

"What?"

He shrugged, stare floating back to the bookshelf. "I don't know Stefan or Caroline particularly well, but in general, people know their own shit. They might not talk about it or act on it in a way that translates to the outward world, but they know—of course they know. They live it. It's pretty patronizing to assume they don't."

She frowned, the words spurring a kind of defensiveness in her that had her skin prickling.

"So ultimately, I'd say relax. You're kind of overblowing the role you play in all of this. These are their problems. Let them handle it."

"Relax," she echoed, irritation flaring at his casual dismissal of it all. "Even if their way of handling it is destructive, just… relax."

His brows ticked upward at the bite in her voice. "First of all, I think it's really easy to come up with an ideal way to handle something that isn't actually happening to you. They know themselves and their situation better than you do. Second of all, it's not like they're out there shooting up heroin and mugging people."

Her eyes rolled. "Of course you'd say something like that."

He face crumpled in confusion. "Something like what?"

"Something someone who can't be bothered with caring about anything would say," she bit back before she could really help it, her defensiveness getting the better of her. It was just… _naturally,_ he wouldn't get this situation. It involved actually taking people seriously, actually caring enough to notice non-extremes.

She expected him to look irritated, but to her surprise, his brow merely furrowed in response. "Sorry, are we now adding me to the list of people who need to be fixed?" His expression grew mockingly pensive. "I'm just trying to keep track."

She faltered a bit. "No, I just—"

"So far we've got that I don't care about anything, Stefan and Caroline deal with breakups badly," he cast his gaze around the room for a searching moment before reaching back, plucking a teddy bear off Caroline's bed, and holding it up. "What's his deal?"

She shook her head. "I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. I'm sure you care about things—"

"Not a whole lot, actually," he interjected, fixing her with a frank stare, "but I don't consider that a problem. And honestly, even if I did, it wouldn't be yours to fix." He cocked his head to the side, observing her pinched expression. "That's kind of the point I'm trying to make."

"Yeah, but—" she heaved quick, frustrated sigh and forced her mouth shut. She knew there was truth to what he was saying. The logical part of her knew it added up. But the fiercely loyal part of her, the part that always wanted to help, struggled with it. "You're right."

He merely stared at her for a second before bursting into an unexpected laugh. Her tense gaze snapped up and met a brightly amused stare. "You're face is like _radiating_ stubbornness right now."

She let out a low, harassed exhalation.

"Are you in physical pain?"

"I'm fine."

"Why don't you just add whatever it is that's about to burst out of you?"

"There's nothing to add."

"I don't really trust your definition of nothing."

"Not my problem." He held her gaze for a long, unblinking beat, expression steady and dryly patient, until she broke. "I just feel like there has to be more to it than just 'stay out of it'."

"There she is."

"Like how can I, as a friend, see this happen to not one, but _two_ people I love and just not do a single thing to help?"

"Who said you couldn't help?"

"You did!"

" _No_ , I said it wasn't your job to fix it," he clarified, leaning further against the bookcase and tossing the bear aside. "If you want to help, I'm sure you can."

She threw a hand up. "How?"

He shrugged. "By being there when they want it." Her eyes narrowed in confusion and he heaved a dramatic sigh. "Look, as you've very subtly pointed out, I'm not big on the feelingsy shit," he explained, causing her lips to purse, "but if I _were_ , I'd imagine that more than anything, I'd want someone who, if I reached out to them, could just kick back with me and… I don't know, listen."

Her expression loosened a bit, slightly surprised by the answer.

"Help me work out my own thoughts. Come to my own conclusions instead of telling me theirs." He shrugged, gaze drifting. "That kind of thing."

She watched him for a beat, briefly outlining the sharp, shadowed lines of his features with her eyes. "You're more mature than you let on, you know that?"

He scoffed. "Your _mom's_ mature." Her lips twitched instinctively, and his own lifted into a crooked hint of a smile.

And then Caroline burst into the room.

"Hey," she said, stare fixed on Damon, "you still down for Jell-O shots and poker?"

His face crumpled in disbelief. "Have you met me?"

"Great, let's go," she said, whirling around to head to the kitchen, and his brows lifted.

"Right now?"

"No, next year."

"It's 11 AM."

She half-turned to give him a baffled look. "Is that a problem?"

He thought about it for a beat before shrugging. "No."

Bonnie watched them clear the room with a familiar mixture of disbelief and amusement, chalking up Caroline's sudden urge to day drink as nothing more than her incurable boredom rearing its head. Caroline, on the other hand, swept into the kitchen with a sped up heart and hot skin, ears ringing with the words she wasn't supposed to have overheard earlier.

 _And the last thing she'd ever want to hear is that he's still influencing who she is._

She didn't know what she felt.

Anger. Indifference. Shame. Defensiveness.

Her emotions kept shifting into each other, brewing into a potent cocktail that had her brain clamoring, and she needed a distraction before they overwhelmed her. "Jell-O mix is in the pantry," she threw over her shoulder, going straight for the handle of rum above the fridge and wrenching it open. Stefan glanced up from the table as she took a jerky swig, and she felt her blood temperature spike in rage: if he so much as _blinked_ at her the wrong fucking way—

"Save some for the Jell-O, Goldilocks," Damon drawled, and she lowered the bottle, swallowing the rum in a burning gulp.

"Just getting a head start on a _long_ night," she replied, charged stare yet to break from Stefan's, as if daring him to say something, to give her an outlet, to go ahead and make her friggin' day.

He merely glanced away, however, returning his gaze to his phone. Her stare cooled a bit.

 _Fine._

No Stefan outlet.

Alcohol it was.

 **AN:** ** _Heyyyyy guysssss. Okay, so this was initially supposed to be just the first half of chapter seven and the second half was all the action/fall-out, but as you can see, this shit is 9,000 words and ended up being way too long to not be its own thing, so sorry if this feels a little fillery. It's a lot of character stuff and groundwork I needed to get laid out in order for the next chapter to make sense, so hopefully, even though it's a little more on the drama/exposition side than the previous few, you get something out of it. Let me know what you think! xx Gabi_**


	8. Jagged

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Eight: Jagged_

* * *

"ARRRRIIIBAAAAAA!"

"OLEEEEEE!"

Caroline brought the Don Q shot she'd just toasted with Damon up to her mouth and tossed it back, face crinkling in a mixture of disgust and delight as the rum burned down her throat. The noisy pair was sprawled over the living room floor in a ridiculous state of undress, five hours deep into a strip poker tournament that kept getting interrupted by the ADD of the stupendously shitfaced.

" _Gah_ ," Damon said upon swallowing, shaking his Santa-hat-clad head to clear it, "brutal."

"Burns so good."

"Burns so _great_."

She slammed her hands down on the coffee table with sudden, bright-eyed conviction, rattling the empty bottles. "Let's burn something!"

Damon snorted, hat slumping halfway off his head. "Been there, done that, survived the resultant pregnancy scare—pick your cards up."

He nodded at the poker hand she'd pinned to the table and she scowled and tossed them on the floor. "I don't wanna play anymore."

"Yeah, 'cause you're _losing_."

"No, 'cause I'm _bored_."

"Soooooore loser over here."

"Oh, _please_ , I've been kicking your ass."

"Attention Apartment 2B," he slurred in a nasally intercom voice, pinching the bridge of his nose to modulate the tone, "you're housing a QUITTER."

She grabbed a handful of cards and flung them at him, missing by three feet.

"QUITTER IN 2B."

" _Lizzen,_ buddy," she snapped, swaying dramatically forward to point a finger at his nose, "I'll have you know tha—" she stopped abruptly, inches from his face, eyebrows diving downward in sudden scrutiny. "Your face is _super_ symmetrical." She grabbed his chin and jerked it from one side to the other in awe. "That's so crazy!" After a beat, she jutted her chin forward and closed her eyes. "Is my face symmetrical?"

He blinked blearily. "Which one?"

"My face!"

His eyes thinned into a squint. "I think the third one is."

She gasped suddenly, eyes flying open in yet another revelation. "You know what we should do!?"

"Absolutely!"

"We should go caroling!"

His hands flew up. "We should go caroling!"

"Oh my God, this'll be sososo fun!"

"Let's do Hamilton—I shred on Lafayette's verse."

"Nuh uh, I already have a playlist saved," she said, nearly falling over in her scramble to get her phone. "All the Christmas classics in order of max…iminium emotional response."

He frowned suddenly, as if something just struck him. "Hooooold on."

"What?"

"Hold the phone."

"Already am, helloooo," she said, waving the phone in her hand.

"Aren't we snowed in?"

She stilled suddenly, considering this new information. " _Shit_."

"Bummer."

"I've had this playlist for years!"

"We can serenade your creepy neighbor."

She perked up. "Perfect! Let's do that!"

"Actually…" his stare brightened conspiratorially, smirk pulling up the corners of his mouth, "I might have a better idea."

* * *

Since the moment Damon first stepped foot in Caroline's tiny girlsplosion of an apartment, he'd spotted Bonnie reading approximately 645 million times—usually, to be fair, textbooks, but still: the girl was a machine. Thus, when he sidled into her room in the middle of the night in search of duct tape, hair mussed and eyes bloodshot from drinking, it came as little surprise to find her face-first in _Gone Girl_.

"Honestly," he began, speech slurring a bit as he came to a halt at the foot of her bed, "this is depressing."

" _Shh_ ," she snapped, lifting a hand to silence him, eyes glued to the words in front of her. She was pretzeled onto the bed like a little kid, legs crossed and elbows propped on her knees, caught in a state of total rapture, and he couldn't help but snort at the sight.

"Likin' the book, then?"

"It has to be him," she muttered in fierce response, reaching into the bag of popcorn beside her and shoving a handful into her mouth. "It juss _'as_ to be'im—she seemfs _so_ cool an' he's bein' _so_ sketshy," she forced herself to swallow, engrossed stare still stuck on the page. "Like those text messages? Who's he always texting? _Who are you texting, Nick_?"

"Amy," he said, and for the first time since he'd walked in, her stare broke away from the book. "They're in it together. Planned the whole thing for insurance money."

She blinked at him. "If you just spoiled the ending," she began after a beat, voice sociopathic levels of emotionless, "I will kill everything you love."

His nose scrunched in a hate-to-break-it-to-ya expression. "Not a very long list of things." He frowned suddenly, reflective. "Zero-item list, come to think o—" the sentence was interrupted by a frighteningly well-flung teddy bear.

" _Did you spoil the ending_?"

"No, Jesus Christ, woman," he said, batting away the offending stuffed animal, and he could almost see the tension release from her ferocious little shoulders. God _damn_. 'Level-headed' his ass.

"Good," she muttered, settling herself back into her pillows and flipping the book back up to her face. "You live to see another day."

"Thanks, Scarface," he mocked, casting his gaze around her room. His vision was swimming a bit, and he squinted to try and steady it. "Caroline said you keep the duct tape hostage… something about a tiramisu incident?"

"Top drawer," she said automatically, flinging a finger up to point at her desk. His lips curled into a sharkish grin: Caroline'd said she'd grill him over motives, but it looked like he'd caught her at the perfect time.

He waltzed over to her desk and pulled the drawer open, briefly noting how cluttered it was compared to Caroline's: post-it notes hung from the shelves, crooked diagrams smothered every inch of free wall space, piles upon piles of highlighted notes spilled from notebooks and folders. It was like a biology book had thrown up all over it.

He spotted the roll of duct tape and plucked it up, though just as he did, his gaze caught on a picture on her desk. It had a young guy—jockish, preppy, early-20s—with a bulky arm slung around Bonnie. Curious, he swiped the frame up and brought it closer to his face, blinking a bit to clear his blurred vision. The guy had a bright, golden-retriever smile and backwards dudebro cap, and Bonnie had a hand up to block the sun from her eyes, which even from a distance sparkled a pretty green.

His brow furrowed. "Who's the Backstreet boy?"

"What?" she asked, lost in her book, and he waved the frame around for emphasis. She begrudgingly tore her stare from the page to look in his direction, and her gaze fell into a squint for a moment before clearing. "Oh, that's my ex."

And then she turned back to her book.

Casual.

Unbothered.

Damon frowned, stare drifting around the room in search of the logic and finding none. "And you have a picture of your ex on your desk because…."

"Oh, I just forgot to take it down," she said, hungry stare zipping from left to right. "We just broke up."

He snorted. "You seem real torn up about it."

She waved a vague hand. "It was amicable, no big deal."

He stared at her for a few seconds, the amusement lighting his face slowly morphing into something subtler. Glinting. A kindling awareness of things that were slowly starting to make sense about her, things that had struck him as odd from the moment she'd told him about her parents. Nonetheless, personal drama wasn't his shtick, so he set the frame down and whirled around, sashaying to the door with a stagger to his step. "'Kay, well, we're gonna go kidnap your crazy neighbor."

"Mmk," she murmured, lip caught between her teeth as she continued reading. He slipped out of the room, leaving nothing but the faint tick of a clock and the flutter of turning pages in his wake. It took a solid five minutes for his words to sink in.

Her head snapped up. "Wait, _what_!?"

She threw the book to the side, scrambling off her bed so frantically that one of her Mr. Moo Cow slippers went flying off. "Damon!" she snapped, bursting into the living room and finding it deserted. Her eyes doubled in size at the sight of the wide-open front door— _ohhhh,_ _no._ No, no, no, no, no, no—

"Damon, Caroline!" she yelled, dashing into the hallway like a madwoman, and she immediately heard a muffled voice coming from around the corner. "Oh my God, they're going to die, they're probably already dead."

She raced down the corridor and rounded the corner in a crazy skid, nearly tripping over her one stupid slipper, and after taking a second to stabilize, she glanced up to a scene that made her stomach clench. Caroline and Damon were plunked on the floor, hands tied behind them and mouths taped up, glaring up at Kai like sulky teenagers who weren't about to get _disem-fucking-boweled._

Kai whirled around at her arrival, face perking up into a bright look. "Hi, Bonnie!"

"Kai," she said hesitantly, hands slowly lifting in an I-come-in-peace gesture. She was going to kill them. _Kill them._ Save them _and then_ _kill them._ "…I can explain."

"Oh, no need," he said with a shrug, casting a fond glance at his two prisoners. "They already did."

"Did they?" she asked nervously, hands curling into fidgety fists. "What'd they say?"

"Oh, just that I was a rampant serial killer and they were going to interrogate me and bring me to justice," he said pleasantly, swinging his glittery stare back to hers. "Which, I mean," he snorted, "is a frankly terrible plan, because if they're right and I _am_ some super prolific serial killer, I've obviously managed to avoid the BPD and FBI for years, so two drunk civilians looking to make a Citizen's arrest with nothing more than impaired motor skills and duct tape is a _wee_ bit uninspired."

She was honestly debating just leaving them there, she was that completely done with them. Like _who_ —how did—what kind of _idiots_ —were they drinking rum or nitrous oxide, she just—? She inhaled sharply, forcing herself to focus. Problem-solving. Crisis-aversion. She was trained for this.

"So here's the thing," she began, racking her brain for how the flying fuck she was going to get them out of this, "they've been watching Law and Order like… _all_ day. All of yesterday, too—really, the whole time we've been stuck here," she insisted, waving a hand, "and today, when they got super drunk, they decided to play detective and made up some murder case, and they tried to get me and Stefan to play along but we were being lame, so it looks like they just pinned it on the only other person on our floor, which is you."

Not her best but not _totally_ unbuyable.

"Which I know is like totally insane, but it's nothing personal, they're just _super_ drunk," she said with a forced laugh, gaze attempting casualness and bordering way closer to panic.

He cast a slow glance in their direction. "Hmm. Felt pretty personal."

Her jaw tightened. "They're just… really dedicated."

"Threw in anecdotal evidence and whatnot…"

She lifted a hand with a commiserating smile. "Did the same thing with me and Stefan."

"Huh," he murmured, terrifying gaze fixed on them, and Caroline narrowed her eyes in an eviscerating glare that made Bonnie jump into action.

"Okay, so now that that's cleared up, I'm just going to—"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Kai sang, lifting a hand as she took a few steps toward them, "what do you think you're doing?"

Bonnie blinked. "I'm… taking them back to the apartment."

His eyes narrowed. "Hmm."

"Hmm what, what's 'hmm'?" she pressed a bit frantically, trying to keep her voice light.

"It's just," he waved a searching hand around, "it feels like I'm not really getting anything out of this exchange."

Her brows lifted, jaw locked into an iron-tight smile. "Exchange?"

He laughed, scoff implicit in the sound. "What, you didn't think I'd just hand them over, did you?" At her tense silence, he adopted a patronizing look. "Life's not a charity, Bonnie."

Her lips pressed into a thin line, fingers clenching and unclenching at her sides. "What, uh," she shook her head, eyes fluttering closed in dread, "what'd you have in mind?"

His head reared back slightly. "Huh. Come to think of it, I don't know." His brow furrowed in delighted surprise as he crossed his arms, lifting a hand to tap his chin. "Let me think for a sec."

She took advantage of his momentary distraction to shoot Caroline and Damon the most life-threatening glare she could muster, eyes radiating homicide, and Damon's stare grew smirky in return as Caroline's rolled. She debated leaving them for the millionth time.

"You know, you're really pretty."

Bonnie felt her heart sink.

 _Ohhh_ , no. No, no. No way. _No_.

"I'm actually wearing a ton of makeup," she lied, gesturing at her face with a feigned look of apology. "So much. It's like caked on. Inches thick. This isn't even my face: without makeup it's all ' _AHHHHH_ , real monsters!', like I'm basically a transformer."

"Go out on a date with me," he said, entirely ignoring her, and her immediate thought was 'to where, the Boston morgue?'

"I have a boyfriend."

"Mmm-mmmmmm," Damon said from behind the piece of tape, shaking his head with a sly gaze, and her eyes flashed over to his in outrage. Kai shot him a curious look before sliding his stare back over to hers.

"He doesn't seem to think so."

"Well, as I'm sure you've gleaned, _he's an_ _idiot_."

"Are you _lyiiiing_ to me, Bonnie?" he sang, the whimsical peppiness making her skin crawl, and she shook her shoulders a bit to clear the feeling.

"No, he just—" her stare flew up, furious that she had to keep making shit up, "it's kind of an on-again, off-again deal, so _technically_ right now we're broken up, but we're already in the process of getting back together, so that's what he's talking about."

Kai's lips pursed, stare flitting over her in an assessing manner before seeming satisfied with the answer. "Alright, well have dinner with me anyway. Here. As a friend." He shrugged. "I like having pretty things around."

'As taxidermy' was what she was positive he'd left out, but nonetheless, in a shining, someone-erect-a-goddamn-statue example of just how _great of a goddamn friend_ she was, she wrangled her mouth into a twitchy smile. "Deal."

"Yeah?" he asked, delighted, and she forced a nod.

"Yep."

"Excellent! I'll hunt us some swan."

Jesus Christ, she was going to die.

She had to wait for him to untie them since he used a 'special knot' of his own creation, and she kept a safe distance until they were standing and ready to go, cursing the fact that Stefan was still working downstairs. If she got abducted with them, no one would know.

"Alright, time to go," she said as they got to their feet, grabbing them by the wrists before they could even take the tape off their mouths and yanking them down the hall. "Bye!"

"Looking forward to dinner!" he called from behind and her face crumpled in dread, giving the idiots behind her an extra hard yank in response.

" _Ow_!" Caroline snapped upon wrenching the duct tape off her mouth, struggling to keep up with her. "Bonnie, don't go to dinner with him, he'll murder you!"

"You _think_?" she snapped, rounding the corner and dragging them to their front door.

"Yeah, cause' _HE'S A SERIAL KILLEEERRRRR!"_ She screeched the last part over her shoulder, whirling around as if to go back, and Bonnie wrenched the door open and shoved them both in with a none-too-gentle touch.

"You both are too drunk to comprehend this right now," she said, glaring at their backs, "but I'm three thousand percent going to find a way to get you back for this. I don't know how yet, but _trust me,_ it's going to be savage."

"Whaaaaatever," Caroline drawled, dancing out of her grip and flouncing over to her bedroom. She shoved her door open and disappeared inside, steps meandering and unbalanced, and Bonnie sighed—so much for their new sleeping arrangements. Honestly, though, it was probably better that they both got rooms tonight. That way she could make sure they didn't go anywhere.

Morons.

"Your turn," she growled, reaching up to grab Damon by the back of his shoulders just as he pulled the tape off his mouth.

" _You_ ," he began, voice a sly drawl as she steered him toward her room, stumbling against her pace, "are a little _minx_."

"Excuse me?"

"Didn't know you had trading sexual favors in you."

Her eyes slitted as her fingers dug a bit into his shoulders, causing him to hiss. "You know for some people, _dinner_ isn't sex, and I think you're missing the part where you should be _thanking_ me instead of calling me a prostitute."

"Psh, no judgment from here, girlfriend," he sassed, attempting to snap his fingers and only managing to bang his hand on the doorframe. "Ow."

"God, you're an idiot," she muttered, struggling to get his bulky frame though the door.

" _Whooooa_ , hey there, handsy," he drawled as she dropped her hands to his waist to maneuver him, shooting a sharkish grin over his shoulder. "It's like I'm seeing a whoooole new side of you tonight. I like it."

"We'll see how much you like it when I kick you in the scrotum."

"Depends—what'll you be wearing?"

"Just get inside," she scoffed, forcing him into the room with a final shove, and he stumbled in with a chuckle.

"Hey, was that," he grunted as he collided with a chair, reaching a hand out to steady himself, "was that true, what you said about your ex-boo thang? The on-again off-again shit?"

"What? No," she said irritably, reaching forward to help stabilize him, "just one of the many things I had to make up because _someone_ couldn't keep himself from being a dick."

"So you're actually just _totally_ cool with a two year relationship ending," he surmised, shooting her an amused look over his shoulder. "No big deal."

Her hand stilled against his back, gaze narrowing in confusion—how did he know how long she'd been with Jeremy? And why was he even asking about it? "I told you, it was a friendly split."

He gave an elfin shrug. "Sure."

Her face took on a flicker of bewilderment. "You know, you seem _awfully_ concerned about my love life for someone who has a zero-item list of things he cares about."

"Ah, ah," he said, lifting a finger up in correction. "Not 'cares about', 'loves'." He shot her a simpery smirk. "Cause love is bullshit."

She gave him a tight smile. "Super healthy outlook—good luck with that."

He snorted as she tried to force him forward toward the bed. "Riiiight, I forgot—you're the 'well-adjusted one'," he mocked, lifting his hands up in a 'woooo' type of wave, and she scoffed at the assertion.

"Okay."

"Model citizen on how to deal over here—everyone take notes," he pressed on, as if addressing a crowd, and she dropped her hand with a kindling scowl.

"What are you talking about?

"Behold this _staggering_ PSA on how to seem totally normal."

Her face crumpled. _"_ What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

He rounded on her in a swift, unexpected move that backed her into the wall with a sudden _thud,_ large palms landing on either side of her head _._ His voice was a smoky murmur _._ "It means I'm onto you."

His hazy stare was locked onto hers, stocky chest looming like a meaningless threat over her small frame, and for a moment, she merely stood there, a spiked, erratic pulse against his slow, slippery heartbeat. Thrown by the proximity. The invasion of space. The unintentional intimacy of his hot, rum-spiked breath fluttering against her lips.

And then the moment passed, and the indignation hit.

What the literal _hell_?

" _Onto_ me?" she echoed, scoff implicit in her voice as she dropped a hand between them, pushing his frame a half-step back. "What exactly are you 'onto'?"

" _Oooooh_ , you know exactly what I'm onto," he sang, stare drifting over her face in lazy exploration. "I know you know, and you know I know, and you wanna know how I know?" he ventured, hand slipping down to brush his knuckles against a wayward curl.

Her stare was hard. "Enlighten me, Dr. Suess."

"I know," he began, voice irritatingly whimsical, "because you and I," he dropped the curl, easing forward with what began as a smirk and slowly transformed into something darker, rawer, voice slipping into a bladed murmur, "are the exact same kind of fucked up."

Her glare faltered.

She blinked a few times, heat slowly beginning to pool in her cheeks, her heartbeat growing irregular as the unexpected words seared into her head.

Branding it.

Burning it.

Pulling on the loose threads of buried memories and exiled thoughts, threatening to coax them out, bring them to light for the first time in years. Her spine grew rigid, stare splintering with images of a hopeless girl, a furious girl, a girl on the brink— _constantly on the brink_ —and before they could take over, she shook her head abruptly, locking them back into a mental safe.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

It was cool, matter-of-fact, her chin ticking upward to add a touch of smugness. He merely stared at her, a breath away, bleary gaze _far_ too incisive for someone as drunk as he was, and after a tense beat, his mouth drifted into a slow smile. Except it wasn't sly or sharkish or any of the things she'd come to expect from him. It was… sad. "Yeah, you do."

And with that unsettling parting note, he pulled away, whirling around and staggering his way over to her bed in three clumsy strides. "I love beds!" he declared, throwing his arms open in a rejoicing gesture before timber-ing face-first into the mattress. She watched him with a distant stare, blood buzzing, desperately trying to rid herself of the tension coursing over her in waves.

It was nothing.

He didn't know her.

He was a fucking _stranger_ , for Christ's sake, why did she even care what he thought?

But no matter what she told herself, she couldn't fight off the burn of nakedness, of feeling exposed, because for a second there, a raw, burning second, she felt like he'd seen her. Not the happy, responsible, level-headed, put-together Bonnie with smooth edges that everyone else saw. The real her.

The jagged her.

And it made her hands shake.

* * *

Some people found silence comforting.

Caroline was sure she'd read that somewhere, but no matter how often she thought about it, the concept always threw her.

Silence turned her skin inside out.

It wasn't a thing; it was an absence of a thing. An indiscriminate void waiting for actual things to come fill it. And maybe for people with nothing but happy things to give, that was fine: they could fill their noiseless pits up with inside jokes and jangling pet collars and the hum of the evening traffic from their bus ride home.

But Caroline wasn't one of those people. And for her, silence filled with other things. Louder things. The crash of a beer bottle shattering by her head. Bladed insults hissed into her ear. The nails-on-a-chalkboard quality her voice would take on whenever someone noticed the bruises. The looping clamor of shows and movies cheering her bright-eyed, teenaged self on, confirming that real love meant chaos, that passion meant pain.

Meant crying constantly.

Meant no one understanding what they had because it was their own fucked up brand of 'special'.

Meant watching herself do things, say things she couldn't explain, couldn't make sense of—things as harmless as wearing red when she didn't want to or as dangerous as cutting people from her life because he didn't like them. Meant a constant, addictive loop of joy, anxiety, guilt, and fear, an insecurity so volatile that it could shoot her into soaring highs or ruinous lows. Meant constantly canceling on people to stay in because he didn't like the idea of her going out, meant screaming matches over texting delays, meant all of this crushing, consuming, destructive bullshit being warped into her fault because 'you make me crazy, Care'—

She sat up in her bed in a breathless jolt of anxiety at the sound of his voice in her head. Her body was trembling, eyes bloodshot from a mixture of panic and drinking, and she shook her head to try and get a hold of herself, forcing herself to breathe as evenly as she could. She needed a distraction. Jesus Christ, she needed a distraction. She knew the spiral was coming—she'd known the second she'd overhead what Bonnie said—but God, did it have to be now? Everyone was asleep, everything was quiet, even their chaotic neighborhood was silenced under the lull of falling snow, and she just needed something, anything, to keep her out of nightmare of a head for—

A muffled noise from the hallway made her stiffen, head snapping up. Silence followed for another few seconds, and then she heard it: the whoosh of a faucet being turned on. Someone was in the bathroom.

Someone tired, half-asleep, and bent over a sink, to be exact.

Stefan had had no intention of falling asleep in the laundry room. Damon and Caroline's midday bender had essentially turned the apartment into a war-zone, and seeing as his little tiff with Bonnie hadn't ended on the best terms, he'd just snatched up a laptop and peaced to the only other place in the building he was aware of to try and get some stuff done.

Working there for a few hours? Definitely part of the plan.

Waking up there with a stiff neck at 4 AM? Not so much.

Thus, it was with a slight wince that he found himself splashing water over his face in the girls' bathroom, shoulders tense and stare bleary. He wasn't sure where the hell he was even supposed to be sleeping, but at this point, he was tired enough to take the floor and be totally happy with it. He scrubbed a tired hand over his face as he pushed the bathroom door open, though just as he slipped into the dark hallway a blur of blonde came straight at him.

"Hi," was all she bothered to say before grabbing a fistful of his shirt and, without any sort of explanation, wrenching his mouth onto hers. He stumbled forward in total disorientation, hand flying up to brace against the wall behind her, and she took this as an invitation to back against it and pull him into her, two fists clasped tightly around his collar.

"What are yo—" was all he managed to get out between charged, heady kisses, entirely fucking thrown: she was everywhere, ravenous, smothering, overwhelming. Her leg hitched up to wrap around him, flushing his hips against hers in a hungry, friction-y grind, and for a second his entire mind blanked, reduced to nothing more than instinct and firing nerve endings.

Her shirt was thin.

Her skin was hot.

His head was white noise.

His hand thoughtlessly began sliding off the wall onto her thigh.

And then the impatient nip of her teeth against his lip snapped him back, and he forced her back by the waist. "Hey, _hey_ ," he said, voice sharp despite the thickness of it, and her shadowed face came back into view. His waylaid anger came flooding back with it—she had the nerve to look annoyed _._ "Literally what the hell is wrong with you?"

She gave a throaty laugh, hands slipping down his chest as she leaned up to recapture his mouth. "Million dollar question…"

" _Caroline_ ," he said, dodging her mouth and catching her wrists in his hands, "stop."

"Why?" she purred, body slithering up against his, and he fought back the physical part of him responding to it.

"For starters, you're drunk," he scoffed, the bite of rum from her tongue still fresh on his, and he caught the faint glitter of an eye roll in the darkness, "and sober you made it obnoxiously clear where you stood on this. Secondly, and more to the point," he pressed on, voice dropping into more of a hiss, " _I don't want it_."

Her hips gave a slow, pointed buck against the growing stiffness between his. "Kind of feels like you do."

"Caroline, look at me," he said, forcing her caught hands up between them in a locked hold. His gaze was steady and hard. "I'm not interested. Whatever game it is that you're playing, it's not cute or sexy or whatever the hell it is you're going for, it's grating. Find another toy."

She held his gaze for an extended beat, silence ringing in the air around them, and for a second, he thought he might've actually struck something in her. A flicker of humility, of humanity, something. But the hope vanished when her eyes turned steely, countenance almost bored in its lack of reaction. "Easy."

He gave a tight, humorless smile. "Great."

And with that, he let go of her hands and turned away, heading down the hallway with tensed shoulders and a locked jaw. He was pissed. He couldn't help it. It didn't feel like enough to just say no, to deflect—he'd let it go this morning and look what'd happened. She was right back to the same crap, untouched and unaffected, not a single scratch to her name.

Enough.

He had teeth, too.

"You know what I don't understand?" he ventured suddenly, coming to a halt a few steps from the living room and easing around. "Why Bonnie defends you. She's one of the best people I know, and you're kind of one of the worst, and yet she constantly pleads your case—I don't get it."

"Oh, I actually know the answer to this one," she said with an unexpected laugh, body a swaying silhouette in the hallway. "It's because she feels sorry for me."

His retort caught at the uncharacteristically self-debasing response, made stranger by the cheery, matter-of-fact quality in her voice. Nonetheless, his harsh tone held in his reply. "She should."

The line of her shoulders eased into a boozy shrug. "Maybe. I mean according to her, everything I've done to try and stop letting shitty people manipulate me has just been letting them control me even more—even once they're out of my _life_ , like how wild is that?—and I'm just…" she heaved a loose sigh, casually casting around for the right words, "destined to be some pathetic, fucked up puppet no matter what I do."

He stared at her, a little thrown by the elaboration. The content of it, the tone of it—none of it matched, and he didn't know how to process it. Was this the next stage of her little game? Try to make him feel bad, reel him back again so she could mess with him a little longer? That didn't even sound like something Bonnie would say, and if sympathy was what she was going for, the carefree tone wasn't doing her any—

A hitched breath rippled the silence and his thoughts snagged, distant stare snapping into focus. She was still standing there, five or so feet away, a stripe of black against the backlight of the window. But her posture had changed. Inverted. Shrunken. Her hands were balled into fists, shoulders hunched up to her ears like her body was trying to fold in on itself, and… he suddenly realized she was shaking. Violently.

"I—" she began unexpectedly, another hitched breath interrupting the word, and the smallness of her voice hit him like a train. It was paper-thin and unsteady, and when she lifted her gaze to his, it was with a tiny, panicked little smile, "I'm so scared she's _r-right_." The last word caught in her throat, fear blooming in her eyes, and before he could even process a reaction, a choked sob burst from her.

"Whoa, hey," he said instinctively, voice throaty with surprise, and she didn't even seem to hear him, shoulders shaking with the force of her tears as her head collapsed into her hands. It was like a tidal wave had hit her: her body seemed to slowly crumble beneath her, back sliding down the wall in a defeated descent, and the shift in demeanor was so blindsiding that he didn't even know what to do.

"She's right, she's so right, God, she's—" Her body curled into itself, a panicked ball of limbs on the floor, and Jesus, had she always been that _small_?

"Caroline," he managed after a few seconds, taking a hesitant step forward, and she immediately jolted at the sound, as if she'd forgotten he was even there.

"No," she said in a jittery voice, forcing herself to straighten, "I'm f-fine, just—" a violently hitching breath cut her off, racking through her body as she struggled to get up.

He couldn't help but take another step forward. "Hey—"

"No, _please_ just—" a sob broke through and she furiously shook her head, scrambling up to her feet, everything about her seeming impossibly slight and unstable, like a gust of wind could blow her away, and his skin burned with bewilderment and the need to fix it.

"Hey," he said as she pitched forward, nearly falling as she tried to stumble past him, and his hands caught her waist. " _Easy,_ it's—" she immediately tried to whirl out of his grip, the chaotic movement making her even less steady on her feet, and he braced his hold on her, " _Caroline_ , hey, just—"

"No, no, no, no," she chorused, twisting in his grip, face crumpled and tear-streaked and so many things that it wasn't supposed to be.

" _H_ _ey_ , Caroline, look at me," he said urgently, hold as gentle as he could keep it without letting her break out, "just let me help you get where you want to go."

She shook her head, likely not even hearing him, and he brought a swift hand up to her face to angle it up to his. "Caroline," he tried one more time, voice quiet but firm, and her bright gaze finally dragged its way up to his. The warm tears against his palm made his chest tighten. "Just let me take you wherever you're going, alright? That's all. Just tell me where."

She simply stood there for a few seconds, silent and shaking, and he canted his head to the side in gentle question.

"Your room?"

The recoil was immediate, her face cracking like that was the absolute _last_ place she wanted to be, and he quickly brought his other hand up to cup her face before he lost her again. "Okay, okay, hey, it's okay," he murmured, thumb instinctively swiping back a damp lock of hair, "no room, just tell me where."

"Y-you shouldn't be doing this," she said helplessly, stare roving anywhere but his, and he seized the chance to keep her talking.

"Doing what?"

"Helping me," she choked out, once again starting to struggle against his hold, and he offered a powerless shrug.

"Call it masochis— _Caro—_ " It was too late: she'd broken out of his grip— _Christ_ , she was stubborn—and was stumbling blindly into the bathroom, a mixture of her emotional and inebriated state making her stride completely unsteady. He set off after her. "Would you just—"

She barely managed to climb into the bathtub, more falling into it than anything, and by the time he reached the edge of it, she'd curled into a fetal position at the base, arms tightly hugging her knees to her chest. The sight of it clenched his heart slightly, and for a few seconds, he just stood there, unsure of what to do.

He was pretty sure she wasn't planning on going anywhere else. Her breaths were still jagged and hitching, but not as badly as before. They were spaced out, and every second made them grow a bit quieter. For the most part, she was as stable as she was likely going to get, and all he was supposed to do was help her to that point.

Technically, he was done.

He should go.

He pressed his lips together, stare tracing over the fan of golden hair, the slight frame shivering in the swallowing T-shirt, the faint glitter of wiped tears catching the moonlight on her hands…

Damn it.

Yeah, he wasn't going anywhere.

A sigh fell from his mouth as he slowly climbed into the tub, taking care to sit on the far edge and leaving her sprawled form undisturbed. Physically, she gave no indication of noticing, her folded up body quiet and mostly still.

He let the silence swallow them for a minute or so before clearing his throat.

"Look, uh," he brought a hand up to rub his neck, brow furrowing a bit, "I don't really know your situation or anything, but." He dropped his gaze, tracing the outline of his hands in the faint light of the window. "I know a thing or two about people changing you, regardless of if you want them to or not."

Silence followed the admission, and he decided to take it as a vague sign to keep going.

"I don't know how much this relates to what you're feeling, but I can't say I've really been the best version of myself since I broke up with Elena." He shrugged, a low, unexpected chuckle slipping out. "And for what it's worth, Bonnie's handed me my own ass about it on a number of occasions, including today."

More silence, but her stillness seemed a bit… tauter. More aware. A listening kind.

He glanced up at the ceiling with a dry flicker of a smile. "She can really stay with you. Five foot nothing and packs one hell of a punch," he said, scratching his jaw. "But she means well." He dropped his stare back to Caroline's drawn form, brow furrowing slightly. "And for what it's worth, I mean, she thinks the world of you."

There was a silent beat, and then: "She shouldn't."

It was quiet, throaty. He was surprised by how strong his instinct to correct her was, given that he'd basically thought the same thing five minutes ago. He just… didn't like that _she_ believed it. His mouth opened to say something, flickered closed, and then tentatively opened again. "Caroline, even if…" he trailed off, aware that he was wading into potentially dangerous territory, "even if what she said is true." He glanced down at her. "About the whole still being controlled thing." He saw her tense slightly, and his brows drew over an intense stare. "I mean, being aware of it gives you the power to change it."

It took her a beat, but her shoulder slowly lifted into a small shrug, eyes still fixed on the side of the tub. "Does it?"

"Yeah," he said frankly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "You can wake up tomorrow and just…" he cast a searching gaze around, "try making decisions based on what makes you happy. Nothing else, just that metric. Do it once, see what happens."

"Is that what you do?" she asked, small voice barely audible, lifting a light finger to trace the curve of porcelain, and his lips twitched into a slow, caught smile, gaze shifting to his hands.

"Uh, no," he admitted. "But… I probably should."

She dropped her finger, pulling her hand back into her body and exhaling shakily. The sound got under his skin enough to prompt him to do something stupid.

"Look, this isn't all your ex."

The comment was firm and matter-of-fact, and her profile turned slightly to glance at him, surprised.

"I know I don't know you that well," he pressed on, entirely unsure where he was going with this, "but even I know you're willful as hell, and there's no way this is all your ex because," he gestured rather exasperatedly, searching for the words, stare flitting around and brain sputtering for an answer until, "because my changes aren't all Elena." He dropped his hand slowly.

Well.

He hadn't expected that.

But as it sank in, he suddenly knew exactly where he was going.

"Some of them are, sure, but some of them are just, I don't know, growing up. Learning from mistakes." He shook his head. "I idealized the shit out of people and only saw the good and it got me cheated on for an entire year, and frankly, that's not the only time it bit me in the ass. So no. No, this isn't all Elena, just like your changes aren't all your ex. Maybe you were naïve before, maybe you let too many things slide—I don't know, I wasn't there, but I do know that it's really easy for people to praise qualities that sound great on paper, but in practice, kind of just get you fucked."

She merely blinked at him, gaze red and still, and after a charged moment of silence, he cleared his throat.

"Which, I mean, isn't to say everyone should just be an asshole, but…" he shrugged awkwardly, aware he'd gotten a bit carried away, "I just think there's a middle ground."

She continued to stare at him, and for a second, he wondered if he'd just managed to make things worse. Her next words seemed to confirm it.

"You shouldn't be here."

Perfect.

Old Caroline was back.

Fun while it lasted.

He dropped his hands to his knees in preparation to get up.

"I've been," she shook her head, and something about her voice made him stop, "so mean to you, and yet here you are," she lifted a hand to gesture at him, something like embarrassment brightening her cheeks, "sitting with me in the middle of the night, talking me through my beyond pathetic drunken breakdown, and I just…" she trailed off, tear-stained gaze lifting to meet his. "I've been such a bitch to you."

He slowly eased back down, feigning a thoughtful look. "Have you?" She let out a throaty laugh, and the corners of his mouth instinctively lifted at the sound. "I hadn't noticed."

"Yeah, you had."

"I figured you were just mad at how in love with me you were."

She wiped a tear from her cheek. "I mean, that goes without saying."

His smile widened, and a small one of her own flickered over her mouth, though it quickly dissipated into something darker. Quieter. He could nearly see the thoughts churning in her eyes, shadowing the light blue, and almost as if she realized this, she averted them.

Silence stretched between them for a minute or so. He debated saying something but kept settling on no: the words hanging between them didn't feel like his. This seemed to prove right when her lips finally parted.

"It was just," she began in a hesitant murmur, as if reluctant to say anything more but knowing she should, "I... this is going to sound stupid, but," she shook her head, exhaling in resignation, "you kind of remind me—"

He let out a light groan. "Don't say I remind you of your asshole ex."

"No, no, I mean—yes, but… the good things." She shrugged vaguely. "The things I liked, that everyone liked. You and him have a lot of those in common, and overtime," she continued, voice dropping into something shakier, "overtime, I sort of… ended up hating those more than anything."

He stared at her for a second. "Because they're what kept you coming back."

Her lips curled into a quiet, bitter smile. "Every time."

He nodded slowly, stare dropping to his hands.

"Which... isn't meant to be an excuse or anything," she murmured, gaze dropping down to her clasped hands, "I just, you know." She shrugged, pulling her legs into her chest more tightly. "Thought it might explain some things."

"Makes sense."

She stayed silent for an extended moment, stare still fixed on her hands. Then, in a voice so small he could barely hear it, "Sorry."

He leaned his head forward, brow furrowing. "What was that?" Her eyes flew shut, lips breaking into a smile that sparked his blood, spurring him to be even more annoying. "That sounded an _awful_ lot like an apology, but I just didn't quite—"

" _Sorry_ ," she said louder, voice taking on an annoyed drawl, and he shook his head.

"Nope, can't make it out, I think you need to sit up."

She laughed despite herself. "I'm—"

"Sit up or live in unforgiveness," he said, leaning forward to grab one of her hands, and she groaned as he pulled her into a sitting position, back sliding up along the side of the tub till she was fully upright.

"You're obnoxious," she griped, and he frowned in blazing confusion.

"Weren't you apologizing?"

"Was I?"

"Profusely."

"I wouldn't go that far."

"Oh, I would."

She sighed. "Jesus, fine: Stefan, I'm _really really_ sorry."

His lips twitched. "You're _really really_ forgiven."

"You sure?" she asked, voice lilting with a layer of humor that attempted to disguise the vulnerability of the question. "I mean, I've been _pretty_ unfair to you..."

"Hey," he said with a shrug, eyes sobering a bit as they held hers, "I wasn't super fair to you, either. Let's both just maybe... chill a bit in the future."

Her sardonic smile softened into something warmer, a slip of unexpected sunlight between clouds, and it did something to his pulse. "Deal."

"Good."

For a moment they just sat there, completely silent, shadowed green eyes on softened blue ones, thawing in the unexpected warmth of the other's presence. It was unsettling in the pleasantest of ways. His skin thrummed.

After a long beat, she glanced down. "You should go to bed, it must be crazy late."

An urge to yawn hit him almost immediately, as if her words had triggered it. "Just 4:30," he offered casually, struggling to stifle it and ultimately failing.

She glanced up at the window with a small, unexpected flicker in her eyes. "Sunrise is in an hour." It was an instinctive murmur, more to herself than anything, but it had a youthful excitement to it that was so unintentionally charming that it struck him for a second.

He blinked a few times to shake the hold. "Big sunrise person?"

Her shoulders lifted into a distant shrug, and she settled her chin on her knees as she stared out the window. "I just like watching the world fill with light."

He remembered something about her writing just then, something about how she hated the term 'falling for someone'. How she thought people should rise for each other instead. He wondered briefly if her draw toward sunrises had anything to do with it.

"You really don't have to stay," she murmured, faraway stare trained on the falling snow, and it drew him out of his thoughts. He glanced at the wintry nightscape for a deliberating second before switching his stare back at her.

"I don't know," he ventured, "seems like these are the best seats in the house for this world lighting ceremony." Her lips quirked. "Mind if I join you?"

Her stare swung up to his, still a little red. "Only if you want to. I'm really okay."

"Are you kidding?" he said, slowly lowering himself into the tub and sliding over to her side, backs to the room, faces to the window. "I couldn't care less about you, I just want to see the world fill with light."

Her lips cracked into a slight smile, eyes crinkling a bit at the corners, and a deeply concerning headiness smoked out his thoughts as he settled in next to her. Warmth, rum, and lavender immersed him in roughly equal measure.

"Not bad," he offered, rolling his shoulders against the curve of the tub. "I can see why you like it so much."

"Try sleeping here three nights in a row."

He deliberated for a few seconds before wincing. "Yeah, maybe not."

She smiled, stare angling toward him from the corner of her eyes. He smiled back, and after a beat, the moment seemed to grow a bit heavier. Not with tension, really, but with something else. Something gentler. Whirring. The amusement in her gaze softened.

"Thanks, Stefan."

He debated saying something insouciant, ridiculous, something to keep the crinkle in her eyes, but decided against it, going instead with a quiet, "Anytime, Caroline."

He was surprised to find that he meant it.

Anytime at all.

She held his gaze for a quiet stretch before turning away and unexpectedly shifting her body against his, head titling to the side to rest on his shoulder. The flare of lavender was immediate, wafting from the coil of soft, golden hair slipping across his neck, and for an hour or so, they merely stayed like that, breaths matched, pulses syncopated, waiting for the sun.

And all he could think was that the world had already filled with a little light.

 _A/N: I've been writing all day. I don't even know. This was a lot of emotional shenanigans and my brain's fried. I'll fix the rough spots later when I have the energy to proofread. Hopefully the pace/events of the last chapter seem more understandable now that you see where they're heading. Bonnie and Damon are about to start ramping up. Stefan and Caroline are about to start getting settled. I'm exhausted. Happy Valentine's Day!_


	9. Powder Keg

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Nine: Powder Keg_

* * *

Caroline woke to the sound of trickling water.

It was a sluggish awakening, her eyes stubborn to open against the avalanche of snow-reflected light pouring in through the bathroom window, and after a solid moment of trying and failing to rouse herself, she gave up, burrowing deeper into the lulling warmth of her pillow. It responded by shifting slightly to pull her closer, and in her barely conscious state, that struck her as entirely normal.

Typical pillow stuff.

Happens all the time.

She was almost entirely asleep again when the crash of a toilet flushing hit her ears. Her head snapped up and promptly crashed into an unassuming chin, and the hiss that followed made it _amply_ clear that she wasn't, in fact, dealing with a pillow. Her bleary stare took a second to focus before faltering at the pair of wincing, sun-drenched green eyes staring back at her, the pupils mere pinpricks in the saturated light.

Stefan.

Her face crumpled—wait, _Stefan_?

Why the hell was she with Stefan? She shook her head, the events of last night flickering through her head in blurry snapshots: drinking… poker… Damon… Kai… Bonnie…

Her limbs stiffened suddenly, eyes flaring wide.

Stefan.

Her breakdown.

The hallway and the tub and _Jesus_ Christ, what the hell had she been—

"Huh," a sleepy baritone cut in from behind them, snapping her focus as they both glanced over. A half-asleep, wild-haired Damon was standing in the middle of the bathroom, staring at their twined position as if he'd only just realized they were there. After a puzzled beat, he shrugged. "Mazel tov."

She cleared her throat, detangling herself from Stefan and backing away to the opposite edge of the tub. "This isn't actually—we just—" her skin was starting to burn with heat, some escalating blend of regret and anxiety, and as if noting this, Stefan edged in to finish the sentence.

"We just fell asleep." His voice was a grind of gravel against his throat, stare drifting back over to hers in an assessing manner that spiked her budding anxiety. "That's all."

Damon just blinked at them for a moment, expression flat, before whirling around. "Whatever, I'm still drunk." He staggered out the door and turned to the left, vanished for a few seconds, and then promptly seemed to realize he'd gone the wrong way. "Use protection," he offered as he passed the doorway again, waving an unceremonious hand before disappearing down the hallway.

Stefan's lips pressed into a resigned line. "He's really something."

She ignored him, straightening herself up with jittery movements—she needed to get out of there. Her body was practically electric with the need to be somewhere else, anywhere else— _God_ , how could she have broken down like that? In front of him, in front of _anyone_?

It'd been years. _Years_ since someone had seen her like that, handled her like that, talked her through a Matt crisis—fucking _Matt_ , the shadow that seemed to be able to darken her brain whenever the hell it wanted, even when she hadn't seen him in years. Even when she'd sworn to herself she was done.

The day she'd finally left him, she'd given herself a day to cry with her mom and friends. One day, and that was it.

The rest she dealt with alone. Relying too much on people was what'd kept her in that godforsaken relationship in the first place, so she'd forced herself to learn to only rely on herself. She'd been so tired of being weak, of feeling weak, of having people watch her be so goddamn _weak_ every second of every day that'd she'd vowed to never lose it in front of anyone again, never _need_ anyone again, sometimes not even Bonnie, and now—

"You okay?"

The murmur made her jump, and she glanced up to a cautiously furrowed brow that made her shoulders tighten. "I'm fine," came the curt response, her arms hooking over the edge of the tub as she struggled to pull herself up. Her head was splitting— _God_ , she'd had a lot to drink—and her arms felt so feeble under her weight that they gave a bit.

"Hey, easy," he said as he reached out to bolster her, and she recoiled at the touch.

"I've got it," she said, nudging his hand off her waist, and he reached back and pulled himself up to his own feet in response. She knew a hand would be proffered before he even did it, and like clockwork, it was in front of her face not three seconds later.

"Just take it." There was a glint of humor in his voice, an uncomfortable overfamiliarity with her stubbornness, and she gritted her teeth and forced herself up on her own, wincing as the throb in her head intensified from the effort. His hand fell to his side at the refusal, amused gaze dropping to the floor. "Caroline—"

"What?" The snap in her voice was harsher than she'd meant it to be, fueled by the anxiety buzzing beneath her skin, and his stare lifted back up to hers.

His brows ticked upward. "So we're back to this?"

She gave a jerky shrug, the pull of her room, of her privacy, of a space to think clearly and assess the damage heightening to a clamor in her head. "Back to what?"

He merely stared at her for a second, their frames outlined in sunlight—he knew she knew exactly what he was talking about. His eyes were frank, scrutinizing, searching for some semblance of whatever the hell he assumed last night had been, and her jaw tightened in response. After a tense stretch of silence, his expression grew resigned.

He scrubbed a tired hand over his face. "Got it."

Her shrug was edgy. "Nothing to get."

"Fine," he replied in the tone of someone who didn't care to argue, turning and stepping out of the tub. His hand immediately went for his neck, craning it with a wince, and she felt a pang of guilt as he walked toward the door. He'd slept in the tub for her. The feeling wasn't enough to break through the nerves, though, and the desperation to be anywhere where the light wasn't so bright, so exposing had her stepping out of the tub in his wake.

"I'm going to make some coffee," he said over his shoulder, lifting a hand in subtly mocking surrender, "if that's okay."

"Sure, fine," she said, brushing past him with a hastiness that seemed to surprise him, for after a debating moment, he reached a hand out.

"Caroli—" she jumped at the brush of his fingers against her wrist, whirling around and snapping her hand back with a startled look, and he immediately drew his hand back, lifting it in an appeasing gesture. His brows were raised, expression vaguely alarmed. "Sorry."

"Uh, no," she shook her head, irritated by the overly panicked reaction, "you're fine, I just—" God, she just wanted her room, "I get, you know, edgy when I don't get enough sleep, so."

His brow furrowed, and the concern on his face made her feel nauseous. "You sure you're okay?" Her stare slid upward, desperate for the conversation to be over. "'Cause if it's about last night, I mean," he gave a low chuckle, "for what it's worth, I think I needed that pep talk more than you di—"

"I'm just tired," she sliced in, trying her best to keep her voice even. She didn't want to snap at him, didn't want him to think it was personal, but it still managed to carry an edge, and his mouth drew shut, his briefly warmed stare neutralizing at the shutdown.

"Okay."

She attempted a smile that ended up being little more than a flat line. "Enjoy your coffee." She whirled around before he could add anything and headed toward her room, swinging the door shut behind her in as controlled and non-slamming a manner as she could manage.

And then she fell back against it.

And then she pressed a hand over her pounding head.

And then, for what felt like the first time since she'd woken up, she let herself breathe, head knocking back against the wood.

What the hell had she been thinking?

* * *

Idiot.

Idiot was the word Stefan was looking for.

Because at this point, it honestly took an _idiot_ to think that he was ever going to get anywhere past Unnecessary-And-Abject-Hatred-ville with Caroline, and yet here he was, caught in her whiplash for what felt like the hundredth time. Tired. Exasperated. Very much done.

And unable to shake off the feeling that ultimately, he wasn't.

It was always something. A look, a sentence—something that made him hesitate to write her off completely—and this time, it was the way she'd looked at him when he reached out to stop her, her eyes raw and battle-ready. No one had ever looked at him like that before, like he was an instinctive threat to them, and something about it charged his skin.

He didn't like that her mind went there.

He didn't like that someone had conditioned her mind to go there.

And he once again found himself thinking less about the fact that she'd essentially told him to fuck off and more about the glimmers of things that made him not want to.

 _Idiot._

He sighed as he flicked the coffeemaker on, rolling his shoulders to try and ease the dull ache in them, and the unexpected scrape of a chair being pulled back pricked his ears. He shot a glance over his shoulder that promptly furrowed into one of total bewilderment: no way. No way in _hell._

He was seeing things.

He had to be, because there was no other explanation for why Bonnie Bennett, champion of all things snuggly and 'five more minutes', was sitting at the table, wide-awake and glowering, at eight in the morning on a day off. He eased around and leaned back against the counter, arms crossing over his chest. "You know what's wild? You look _exactly_ like my friend Bonnie."

She rolled her eyes. "Hilarious."

"Jesus, you even _sound_ like her."

"Crack of dawn comedy hour."

"Are you aware you're an identical twin, like should I call Maury?"

"Do you want me to throw these tomatoes at you because I will."

His lips quirked at the token morning irritability—she'd been the exact same way since five years old. Surliest face walking into pre-school, sunniest face leaving it. "Explain yourself, Bennett."

She slumped deeper into the chair and gave a grumpy shrug. "Couldn't sleep."

"Since when?"

"Since," she waved a vague hand around, seemingly searching for a reason before settling on one, "Damon and Caroline forced me to spend the entire night worried about waking up to Kai standing over me with a butcher knife and a dead swan."

His brow furrowed. "Kai like crazy neighbor Kai?"

"That's the one."

"Why would you wake up to a dead swan?"

"Because the Drunk Disaster Twins decided to kidnap him last night," she grumbled, "so naturally he ended up kidnapping _them_ instead, and in order for him to hand them over he negotiated a dinner date."

His brows flew up. "With you?"

"No, with the dead swan— _yes_ , with me." He stared at her for second before bursting out laughing. "It's not funny, I'm going to die."

"You're not going to die 'cause you're not going to go."

"I have to go—he knows where I live."

"No _way_ , are you crazy? Just avoid it."

"We're literally snowed in for three more days—explain how I'm supposed to avoid it."

"By saying 'can't right now, sorry' till he stops asking."

She shook her head, plunking her chin into her hand. "Whatever, I'll deal with it later, it's not a big thing."

His stare tapered. "Didn't you just say you stayed up all night worrying about it?"

She glanced up, dropping her hand and straightening. "Well, yeah. I just, you know." She shrugged, looking oddly uncomfortable. "I just meant that I've thought about it enough already."

"…kay."

"Besides," she added, shifting back into her general sassiness and lifting a finger to point at him, "none of this would've happened if _someone_ hadn't abandoned me yesterday."

His eyes drew into a wince. He had kind of thrown her to the wolves yesterday. "Yeah, sorry about that, I just… needed some space to think."

Her gaze softened a bit. "Tends to happen when your friend bites your head off for no reason."

"Eh," he conceded, shoulders easing into a shrug, "I wouldn't say _no_ reason."

Her brows flew up. "No? So Caroline's not the worst anymore?"

A hazy memory of the smile Caroline had given him right before she said thank you flickered across his head, understated and quietly radiant, and he pursed his lips, stare angling to the floor. "There are things I don't know, so." He shrugged. "No current comment."

"I'm going to count that as a win," Bonnie said, mouth taking on a cocky tilt as she sat up in her seat and crossed her arms. "Stefan – 0, Bonnie – six million." He rolled his eyes, turning around to switch the coffee machine off and grabbing two mugs. "You've got to sharpen up your lawyer skills, buddy—this is getting embarrassing."

"I let you win."

"Spoken like a sore loser."

"Remember two seconds ago when you were apologizing for snapping at me? Let's go back to that."

"Coffee first."

He shook his head with a smile as he finished preparing the two cups, and when he turned around a few minutes later, the second surprise of the day staggered into the kitchen: a squinting, scowling, hung-over as _hell_ Damon. "Okay, now this is just—"

" _Shhhhhh, shhh, shhh,_ " Damon cut in, lifting a silencing hand up as he dragged himself to the table and collapsed into the chair opposite Bonnie. "Inside voice, buddy."

Stefan's stare lit with humor as Damon dropped his head into his hands, general countenance radiating misery. He glanced at Bonnie in what he expected to be a shared look of amusement, but to his surprise, she looked… odd. Awkward, almost, like her usual spunky ease had stilted into something stiffer.

Weird.

"I'm assuming you need this more than I do," he drawled as he set a mug down in front of Damon, holding the other out to Bonnie. She didn't seem to notice, scrutinizing stare fixed on Damon's head. He shook the mug. "Bon."

"Mm?" she said, breaking out of her thoughts, and her sharp gaze swiftly neutralized at the sight of the coffee. "Oh, right, thanks."

He frowned as she took the mug, cradling it to her chest instead of taking her usual impatient gulp. "'Course."

He swiveled around and walked back to the counter to make another cup, though he took care to shoot a glance over his shoulder: her gaze was fixed on the table, mug hot in her hands, shoulders noticeably tensed.

Alright, clearly he'd missed something. Something that had more to do with Bonnie's lack of sleep than Kai did, from the looks of it.

" _So_ , Damon," he began as he grabbed another mug, the awkwardness starting to pervade the room, "what brings us the pleasure of your scowling company this early in the morning?"

"Can't sleep," he muttered, and Stefan's brows ticked upward.

"Weird, neither could Bonnie," he said, checking for some sort of reaction and finding none. "Must be something in the water."

Damon snorted. "I drank _many_ things yesterday and water wasn't one of them." His head lifted a bit. "Though, speaking of water, how was your little bath this morning?" Stefan stiffened a bit. "Or was it more of an all-night thing—hard to tell from earlier."

He shot a tense glance at Bonnie—he hadn't actually figured out how much he was going to tell her about this whole weird thing with Caroline, or how much he was even supposed to tell her—but to his relief and slight concern, she still seemed lost in her own thoughts.

"It was fine," he responded, shooting Damon a blithe smile. "Private, and fine."

Damon sighed, dropping his head back into his hands. "Whatever."

Silence once again fell over the kitchen, textured only by the howl of the steadily intensifying wind outside, and Stefan busied himself with preparing his coffee. The tension in the room was subtle, but he knew he wasn't imagining it. Something was up. "Heard you took on Kai last night," he said eventually, swiveling around and easing back against the counter, steaming cup in hand.

"Who the hell's Kai?"

And for the first time since Damon had staggered in, Bonnie seemed to snap back into existence, mug pausing just before it touched her lips. "Is that a _joke_?"

Damon lifted his head at the sharpness of the tone. "Should it be?"

"You know who Kai is."

His face scrunched in thought, stare lifting ceiling-ward for a deliberating second before dropping back down to hers. "Nope."

She set the mug down in a sharp movement. "The guy you tried to _kidnap_ last night—the one I'm somehow stuck dealing with because I was dumb enough to save you?"

" _Oh_ , that guy," Damon said, lapsing into a dark chuckle. "Creepy Neighbor Dude, right."

"Yeah," Bonnie mocked, "the 'Creepy Neighbor Dude' I have to have dinner with."

"Fuck that," he snorted, reaching a hand out to swipe up his untouched mug of coffee and taking a swig. His brow promptly furrowed. "Yo, this coffee's _gre—"_

"Want to elaborate on that for me?" she cut in, tone a little aggressive, and Stefan's brows ticked upward as his gaze switched back to her. "'Cause I actually live here and have to walk past his door every day and if I just blow him off he'll know, and he'll get angry, and as we've _all established_ , he's incredibly creepy, so what part of 'fuck that' is a solution?"

"It's not a solution, because this isn't a problem," Damon replied, shoulders lifting into a careless shrug. "You're assuming it's going to be one when literally nothing has happened—for all you know, he forgot, so just chill, Judgy."

" _Chill_ ," she echoed, brows arching. "Because he probably forgot. Great plan. And if he didn't? What then, get casually murdered?"

He snorted. "Don't you think you're being _just a_ _tinge_ dramatic?"

"You literally met him by having a crossbow held in your face."

He rolled his eyes, tossing his hands up in surrender. "Okay, fine, say he tries to make good on it—just use the jealous boyfriend card and call it a day."

She let out a bright laugh. "You think he's going to buy that? He'll probably tell me to bring him."

He scoffed. "Then bring him, whatever."

"You mean the boyfriend I just broke up with?"

"Bring someone else—bring Stefan," he said, waving a careless hand in Stefan's direction, and Bonnie's eyes narrowed.

" _Or_ , how about I bring you?" She gave a mocking shrug. "I mean, you're the reason I'm even in this mess, so how would _you_ feel about a quality night of near death experiences and possibly getting drugged and gagged?"

"Sounds like my typical Friday night, to be honest—sign me up."

Her gaze slitted. "Really."

"Yeah, sure," he said with a shrug, entirely unbothered, "tell him sparks flew and the cosmos aligned and all this bickering ended up being foreplay for sweet, sweet love and now I can't handle a night without you." His eyes gave a brief, simpering little flash. "Darling _._ "

Her lip curled at the term, gaze steady on his. "I'm holding you to that."

"Hold away. In fact tie me up, I'm into that. No promises that I'll make a super convincing boyfriend, though." His gaze tapered as he took another sip of coffee, lighting with a subtle glitter. "Not that that'll be new for you."

Her shoulders, mid-way through relaxing back against her chair, promptly stiffened, gaze snapping up to his. A tense beat passed, and Stefan's stare switched between the two of them, head cocking to the side.

"I'm going to take this to go," Bonnie said after a second, scraping her chair back and getting to her feet, and he arched a brow as she plucked her coffee up and headed to the door. "Thanks for making it, Stef."

"Sure thing," came the easy reply as he watched her leave, arms crossed and eyes narrowed, and after a few seconds, his gaze swung over to Damon. He was sprawled back against the chair, limbs outstretched in a lazily indulgent manner, and something about him seemed the slightest bit… smugger.

Stefan pushed himself off the counter and walked over to the table, dropping himself into Bonnie's now vacant seat. He set his coffee down with a curious look and steepled his fingers. "So…"

Damon shot him a sarcastic flicker of a smile. "So."

"That got a little weird."

"What?" he snorted, flinging a thumb over his shoulder. "You mean with Suzie Sunshine over there?"

Stefan's stare remained intent, ignoring the humor. "Everything good?"

"Fine," he said with a shrug, though his gaze took on a mocking glint. "Private, and fine."

His lips twitched absently at the echoed words, assessing gaze still fixed on Damon's. "Word of advice, man?"

Damon swallowed another swig of coffee. "Hit me, Yoda."

"Tread carefully." His bleary gaze shifted upward, as if not expecting the warning tone. "Bonnie's calm as hell until she's not."

Damon's mouth took on a slow quirk. "I think I can handle it." Stefan shrugged, easing back into his seat as Damon lifted his hands. "But hey, no worries, I'm not about drama, so your bestie's little glass house is safe."

His brows drew inward at the term, now _really_ wondering what the hell had been said between the two of them. Bonnie played it off like a champ, but he'd known her since she was five years old. He'd seen all the shit go down in her life—the anger, the loss, the dealing, the breakdowns, the putting herself back together again, the scar tissue to go with it—and on the off-chance Damon was thinking about diving into any of that, he _really_ didn't know what he was getting himself into. Bonnie was an unlit bomb. The last thing anyone needed to be doing was striking matches around her.

"Glad to hear it."

Damon gave a brief salute in response. " _Well_ ," he said after a beat, pushing his chair back, "I'm going to go take a shower; see if it gets the room to stop spinning. Should I pour some bleach over the tub first, or—"

"Fuck off," Stefan interjected in an exasperated mutter, shaking his head, and Damon waggled his eyebrows as he got to his feet.

"Better safe than sorry, bro." Stefan watched him waltz out of the kitchen through a flat gaze only to have him double back, pluck up the bottle of bleach he'd left on the counter when he'd come in late last night, and hold it up. "Just in case."

"Prudent."

"Always." He shot him a wink and then disappeared again.

Stefan sighed, switching his stare to the window. The blizzard was merciless outside, inundating the city in sheet after sheet of snow, and he couldn't help but wonder how the hell they were going to survive three more days of this. Him and Caroline were always going to complicate the situation—they'd been touch-and-go for three years straight, it was a known snag—but he was pretty sure no one had been banking on serious friction between Bonnie and Damon.

This place was turning into a powder keg.

The sound of someone coming in again pricked his ears, and his averted stare flattened. "If you mention the tub again, I'm going to pour that bleach on your head."

There was a beat of silence, and then a distinctly female, "Didn't realize it was such a touchy subject"

His gaze snapped over to the doorway, surprised to find a tentative Caroline hovering beside it. She'd changed into an old, cable knit sweater that came down to her thighs, hair pulled up into a loose bun on top of her head, and he forced his eyes up, hand flying up to rub the back of his neck. "Sorry, I, uh," he cleared his throat, "thought you were Damon."

"Sorry to disappoint."

"Oh, definitely not a disappointment," he said with a chuckle, though his brow promptly furrowed at how that sounded. "Not that—I just mean," he waved an awkward hand as her brows rose. "Damon's a pain in the ass, so anyone's an improvement."

"Got it."

"Yep." He drummed his fingers on the table, painfully aware of how stilted that exchange had been. He wasn't sure why he felt tense—she'd made it crystal clear earlier that nothing had changed, so for all intents and purposes, they should be back to their whole animosity routine—but he felt a little off-balance nonetheless.

"Is there still…?" she gestured at the coffee pot and he followed her gaze.

"Oh, yeah, definitely—help yourself," he replied, lifting a hand in an 'it's all yours' gesture, though his brow promptly furrowed. "Or, I mean, I can—"

"No worries, I've got it," she said, shooting him a hasty smile as she approached the counter, and he slowly eased back into his seat, dropping his hand. That was… polite. His lips pursed. So they were both being weird.

Great.

He watched her pour herself a cup for a few seconds before dropping his gaze to his hands, not wanting to seem like he was staring, and the silence stretched between them for what seemed like ages. "So," he ventured despite himself, aware that it was probably smarter to just stay quiet, "couldn't get back to sleep, then?"

"What?"

"Uh, earlier you said not sleeping enough made you edgy. I just... assumed you were going to try to get some more. In an actual bed."

"Oh, no," she said simply, stirring a spoon into her coffee, and he pressed his lips together, unsure how to reply. Kind of a dead-end. Which, honestly, was probably the point, since it didn't particularly seem like she was in the mood to chat.

"Alright, well," he said, setting his hands down and pushing himself up to his feet, "I'm going to get started on some case pre—"

"Oh, actually I was—" she interjected, whirling around with a bright look that took him by surprise, and for a second, they merely stared at each other, his gaze expectant as hers slowly grew hesitant, "…hoping you could give me some advice about something."

His brows lifted, face struggling to contain his disbelief. "Uh," he lifted a hand to scratch the back of his head, "sure."

She averted her stare, fingers gathering into loose fists by her side, and he suddenly realized she was nervous. Not like cripplingly so, but enough for him to notice, and much to his annoyance, he found himself instinctively endeared.

"What's up?"

"I was thinking about making breakfast." It was an odd admission, her voice a little slower than it's usual quippy speed, and he blinked.

"Breakfast."

"Yeah."

"I thought you didn't do breakfast."

"I don't." She shook her head to correct herself. "I didn't—I mean, I did, but then I didn't, but I want to. Try, I mean. To make it. Today."

He held her gaze for an extended second, a little thrown. "Okay."

"And since you're, you know, all culinary," she said, waving a loose hand, "I figured you'd have some suggestions." She cleared her throat. "Easy ones. Preferably."

To say he had questions was an understatement. Yesterday, the combined idea of him and breakfast was enough to completely set her off. When they'd woken up this morning, she seemed like she couldn't get away from him fast enough. When he'd reached for her hand to stop her, she'd looked ready to deck him.

And now she wanted breakfast suggestions.

A hundred queries poised themselves on his tongue, the most prominent being 'what changed from twenty minutes ago', but something about how uncertain she looked gave him pause. She seemed hesitant, evasive—ready to change her mind at the first sign of pushback—and he couldn't shake the impression that for some reason he didn't understand, this was hard for her.

So he responded with as casual a shrug as he could manage. "Sure—let's see what we've got." She followed him to the cabinet by the fridge, otherwise known as Bonnie's sacred breakfast haven, and eased to a halt beside him as he opened the door. An absurd assortment of packaged pastries and mixes came into view, and his lips pulled up into a lopsided smirk. "As you can see, you have options."

"Mm," she replied, still seeming a bit off, and he became vaguely aware of the warmth of her beside him.

"Alright, how do you feel about…." he reached up and grabbed a blue box, "pop tarts?"

The recoil was immediate. "Gross."

His lips quirked, the ambient tension easing a bit around them. It was the first thing she'd done so far that felt like her. "Okay, resounding no to pop tarts."

"Sorry, I just," she shook her head, "the sugar content in those things is insane, I don't know how Bonnie likes them."

Stefan snorted. "Cause Bonnie could live off sugar."

" _Right_?"

"It's ridiculous."

"She kills a bag of candy like it's meant for one sitting."

"More than than a bag—Halloween was basically me collecting her back-up bag every year."

She let out a small laugh. "I believe that."

He had a sudden, confusing impulse to catch a glimpse of her smile. It was a sharp pull, nagging and ridiculous, and he shook it off, opting instead to let the silence settle back over them as he scanned the shelf for option two. The tension came back a bit, prickling against his skin, but it didn't seem as thick as before. "Okay, what about oatmeal?"

"Mm," she hummed, "not a fan."

"Really?"

"Weird texture."

His brow furrowed at the unexpected answer, gaze lighting with a flare of amusement. "Fine. Waffles?"

Silence met the option, and after a beat, he shot her a glance from the corner of his eye. Her nose was gathered into a full scrunch, mouth pursed in distaste, and his lips instinctively twitched at how childish the expression was. "Pass."

"Who doesn't like waffles?"

"They're like pancakes pretending to be something else."

"What?"

"It's the same mix in a different mold, it's weird."

"What kind of reason is that for not liking them?"

She shrugged, stubborn stare still trained on the shelf, and he couldn't help but smile at her. She honestly looked five years old, all curls and freckles and picky food preferences, and something about it just... charmed him. Completely and unexpectedly. So much so that he found himself staring, really, and he forced himself to look away with a vaguely bewildered feeling—what the hell was wrong with him? "Alright," he said, shaking his head to clear it, "let's see if there's literally _anything_ in here you do like..."

Despite himself, he took care to catch a brief flicker of her smile before returning his gaze to the shelf.

* * *

As far as Bonnie was concerned, she was fine.

Totally fine.

Peachy, really—which would explain why she was sitting serenely in the middle of her reclaimed bed, legs folded and wrists propped onto her knees, meditating. The snow was a lush blanket of white against her window, the whistling wind blending with the ebb and flow of her breathing, and honestly, she couldn't think of a more peaceful start to a morning.

A little yoga.

A little meditation.

A little snow.

A little coffee.

Her jaw tightened at the intrusive memory of smug, bloodshot blue eyes taunting her from over the rim of a steaming mug, and her irritated stare flickered open.

 _No_.

Not irritated.

Because she was fine.

Because the opinion of random strangers who thought they knew her for absolutely no reason didn't bother her.

Obviously.

She forced her eyes shut again, fingers clenching a bit in their thumb-to-pointer-finger circles. Breath in. Breath out. Wind. Snow. Coffee. _Breakfast_. The best meal of the day, and she hadn't even had it yet—

Her vexed eyes cracked open again.

She hadn't had it yet because _someone_ couldn't keep his baseless opinions to himself.

'Not that that seems new for you'—the hell did that even mean? That Jeremy wasn't a convincing boyfriend? Cause Damon a. knew what a convincing boyfriend was and b. knew Jeremy and c. knew _her_ , right? Please. Nonsense all around.

She sighed, rolling her shoulders and once again closing her eyes. Back to ohm. Namaste. Nirvana. Zen. Kumbaya. Buddha. Macarena. Hakuna mata—oh, who was she kidding, she didn't know how to friggin' mediate.

"Ugh," she groaned, flopping backwards and landing on her bed in a dramatic puff of sheets. She was vaguely aware of the fact that she was overreacting. Damon was crass and outrageous all the time—picking on an ex-boyfriend was hardly the worst thing he'd done since she'd met him. Maybe she was hormonal. Or sleep-deprived. Or lying to herself about what was really bothering he—

She exhaled sharply to clear the thought. It was the lack of sleep, it had to be. She sighed, pushing a stray curl off her face and closing her eyes for the millionth time: maybe a nap would fix her mood. She didn't feel particularly tired, body totally wired since this morning, but she forced herself to try and sleep anyway, thoughts drifting to drowsy things.

The warmth of her pillowy comforter beneath her.

The sluggish rise and fall of her chest.

The whisper of her breath in her ears.

 _Because you and I are the exact same kind of fucked up_.

She jolted up, swinging her legs over the side of her bed and getting to her feet. Nope. Enough. She was going to make some breakfast and get some work done because this was just _absurd_. "Stefan!" she called out, yanking a robe over her tank top as she reached for the door. "What's the most thought-consuming breakfast we ca— _Jesus_!"

She jumped at the unexpected, dripping, and virtually naked sight of Damon standing right in the middle of her door doorway. He was holding a hand towel that couldn't be more than a square foot over his crotch, expression flat and stance casual. "You're out of towels."

She blinked, bewildered stare sweeping over the length of his hard, glistening frame before snapping up to his face. "And you're loitering naked outside my room _because_ …? _"_

His brow furrowed. "You said you had towels."

"When did I say that?"

"Trapped day numero uno."

"I never said that," she bit back, annoyed with how flustered the unexpectedness of him naked in her doorway was making her, and his eyes narrowed.

"Uh, _yeah_ , you did—you were all 'if you need anything at all: blah blah blah towels, just ask'." Her irritation ebbed in the flow of realization—she had said that. "Look, if you don't have one, just tell me where to go because it's fucking cold."

"No, I do, I—just," she held up a hand, stare instinctively dropping to the hand towel before averting, "just wait here."

She whirled around and headed over to her closet, fingers curling into loose fists along the way: she really needed to get a grip on this random anxiety of hers. Enough was enough. She grabbed her spare towel and turned around with a look of reestablished composure that promptly broke—he was staring up at her gallery wall of pictures, entirely bare backside facing her.

Her jaw locked, indignant stare flying up to the ceiling. "What part of 'wait here' was confusing?"

"It's warmer in your room."

"Explain that to our central heating."

"Maybe it's from your sunshiney disposition."

Her lips pressed together, oddly uneasy with the fact that he'd noticed her shift in temperament. "Here's your towel." She tossed it at him with a blind movement, stare still fixed on the ceiling, and after a stretch of about ten or so seconds, hazarded a glance back down. He'd slung it around his waist with a loose knot, hand currently tousling his spiky black hair, and her eyes slitted. "Think you can scatter water somewhere else?"

His hand slowed at the unexpectedly caustic edge in her voice, gaze dragging up to hers. It had a kindling gleam—curious, subtle—but something about it seemed to carry the faintest hint of warning. A glitter of 'careful, doll. I bite back'.

She suddenly realized that they'd never really been antagonistic to each other before. Exasperated, annoyed, bickery—sure, in passing, but always without any real teeth, never actually taking it seriously. This felt different. Sharper. More personal. And if the look he'd given her was any indication, his battle-mode was a little more confrontational than his perpetually blithe countenance suggested.

"Sure," came his eventual response, his expression slowly reverting into something pleasant. "'Course."

"Great."

He swiped the hand towel up and headed for the door, draping it over his shoulder as he passed her. "Thanks for the towel."

"Whatever gets you out." The comment was out of her mouth before she could stop it and he slowed to a halt in her doorway, hand on the frame, body facing away from her. He veered around with a pensive look.

"Do you maybe just want to let whatever it is that's bothering you out?"

She cursed her shitty impulse control, externally keeping a casual exterior. "What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the fact that you've been a _little_ bitchy this morning and something, call it a little bird," he said, waving a whimsical hand, "tells me it has to do with last night." Her body tensed at the directness of the response. She realized part of her had hoped he'd forgotten about it. "Now, normally, I'm all for playing games and dancing around a subject, but I happen to be extremely hung-over, so if it's all the same to you, let's just skip the bullshit."

She stared at him for a moment, deliberating exactly how she wanted to tread. She didn't want to give anything weight, because when you give things weight, people know where to look. They know something's there. And she really didn't need anyone, let alone Damon, poking around into her life. Into things she hadn't talked about in years. Into the quiet, buried reality of her 'kind of fucked up'. "Fine." She cleared her throat. "I thought last night got a little weird."

"Weird," he echoed, and she nodded.

"Yeah, you overstepped." He stared at her, waiting for an elaboration, and she brought a hand up to rub the back of her neck. "You cornered me and I didn't like it." His gaze narrowed at the explanation, and she steeled herself against the scrutiny. Blaming it on the physical imposition was safer. Anyone could have issues with having their space invaded; it didn't prompt followup questions or context demands. "So if we could, you know, avoid a repeat of that in the future, I think that'd be best."

His stare was incisive against hers, sharp with subtle notes of something—amusement, examination, disbelief—and after an extended beat, he averted it, head dropping into a nod. "Alright."

"Yeah?"

"Yep," he replied, turning back toward the door, and she felt a flutter of relief course through her. That was easier than she'd thought it'd be. "Anything else?"

"Nope, that's it," she said, and he waved a hand behind him in acknowledgment, disappearing out the door and into the hallway.

…until the same hand caught the doorframe, slowly pulling his body back in. "Just to be clear, which one am I avoiding—the actual cornering or the part where I called you on your bullshit?" She stiffened immediately, her sense of ease deserting her, and he held a thoughtful frown for a mocking few seconds before shrugging. "I'll just assume both. Later, Bon-Bon."

And with that, he actually disappeared, leaving her standing in her room with echoes of the exact same feeling that'd dug under her skin the night before. The feeling that somehow, some way, he was seeing things about her she wasn't actually showing him. Hell, she was actively _obscuring_ them.

She felt a little razed. Unnerved.

But more than anything, she felt tired.

And like she needed a goddamn drink.

* * *

Too starchy.

Too sweet.

Too salty.

Too easy.

Too hard.

One breakfast option was 'too invasive', whatever the hell that meant, and by the time they'd managed to get to 'too breakfasty', Stefan pushed a hand through his hair and hit Caroline with a frank look. "You know, Caroline, there's always just… more coffee."

Her mouth, already halfway poised into a pre-formed excuse, closed suddenly, brow furrowing over her eyes. She looked taken off-guard. Then contemplative. Then, after an extended moment, her stare shifted up to his. "Perfect."

He stifled a smirk, bowing his head into a nod. "On it."

"Oh, I can do i—"

"Just," he held a hand up, "focus on not changing your mind." Her gaze narrowed at the jab, corners of her mouth twitching, and he heaved a playful sigh as he poured the last cup out. "Basically a barista at this point anyway."

Her brows lifted as she watched him work. "Is that your thing? Volunteering to do things so you can act like a martyr about it?"

"Oh, that's a whole class in law school," he replied, distantly aware of the fact that it was the type of comment from her that used to irritate him, yet somehow feeling unbothered. "Required, actually."

"Must fill up quick."

"Not as fast as the one on how to make up ridiculous reasons for disliking things." He held the mug out to her with a glint in his eye. "Hope it's not too coffee-ish."

She shot him a 'ha-ha' look as she took the cup and brought it up to her lips, though her entire face crumpled upon taking a sip, body recoiling.

His brows flew up. "Seriously?" Her disgusted expression held for a few seconds before neutralizing into something more playful, and his indignation quelled. Of course.

"It _is_ a little coffee-ish."

"Good."

She smirked, easing back against the counter and blowing against the steam billowing from her mug. He noticed how much more relaxed she seemed than before—shoulders lowered, features loose—and against his better judgment, it spurred him to ask the question he'd dismissed before.

"Out of curiosity," he began tentatively, turning to face her, "why the sudden change of heart? About... breakfast?"

It was a last second pivot, since what he'd really wanted to ask was 'about being around me', but that felt too intimate. She didn't respond at first, taking her time with blowing against her coffee, and for a solid beat there, he didn't think she was going to answer. So much so, in fact, that he almost missed it when she murmured, "Thought I'd try it out as today's thing." She shrugged. "You know. The one I do just cause it'd make me happy."

He blinked at the echo of his words from last night.

"Or, I mean, cause I thought it would." She gave a sardonic smile, stare on the floor.

He honest to God hadn't even thought she'd been listening yesterday. The realization that she had—enough to remember it, enough to _try_ it—threw him way more than it should, and for a second, he didn't know what to say.

"Uh," he began, shaking his head a bit to clear it, "I mean, you're still doing better than me, so." His chuckle was half-hearted and dry, and she lifted her pale blue gaze up to his.

"You still have time. One thing a day, remember?" He blinked at her and she shrugged, expression mild. "Do something right now."

He held her stare with a fixed one of his own. "Just cause it'd make me happy."

Her shoulders lifted into a light shrug. "Just cause it'd make you happy."

He pressed his lips together, feeling himself getting caught in her stare. It was frank, unblinking, brimming with a perplexing blend of challenge and encouragement, and as a wildly inconvenient result, his train of thought began shifting into just… kissing her.

Just like that. No plan, no preamble, just closing the distance and seeing where it went. His gaze dropped to her mouth, drawn and distracted, though before he could even figure out what the hell he was doing, the sound of slippered footsteps slipped into the kitchen.

"Do we have anything to drink?"

His stare snapped over his shoulder to the sight of a still off-seeming Bonnie making her way over to the fridge. "Uh," he said, scrubbing a quick hand over his face to clear his head, "we just ran out of coffee, but—"

"No, I mean alcohol," she said, pushing up to her tiptoes to see over the top, and his brows took a sudden dive over his eyes, body tensing.

"What?"

"Why are you looking for alcohol at 8 AM?" Caroline said from behind him, a slight note of wariness in her voice, and Bonnie scoffed.

"To drink, obviously."

He watched her jump up and swipe a half-full handle of Jose Cuervo from the top of the fridge, and his stare flew to Caroline's. "That's tequila," he murmured, tone severe, and her expression took on a dawning look of anxiety.

"She can't drink that."

"I know."

Her head shook frantically. "No, like she really can't."

"I _know_."

"Bonnie," Caroline called out, voice hesitant and falsely bright, "that's tequila."

"So?" came the flat response, and Caroline's stare grew a bit strained.

"So _Mexico_ , Bon."

"Mexico, Shmexico."

His head whipped around at the sound of a cap being opened. "Bon," he said, taking a hasty step forward as she brought the bottle to her mouth, "I really think you shou—"

Too late.

The gulp was down her throat in a single, squinty-eyed swallow, and his extended hand slowly closed into a fist, falling down to his side in defeat.

Welp.

They were officially screwed.

Let the countdown begin.

"What?" Bonnie said after a few seconds, stare switching between his and Caroline's paled faces. "Guys, it was just a shot, _please_ —give me a little more credit." She rolled her eyes at their melodrama, setting the bottle down and heading back into the living room, and for a few seconds, there was only silence.

And then:

"Clear off any surface she can climb onto."

"Hide _anything_ pointy."

"Do any of these rooms lock from the outside?"

"Some of them work with a ke—"

"What's all the excitement about?" Damon drawled as he swaggered into the kitchen, fresh from a shower, and Caroline pushed a stressed hand through her hair.

"Bonnie got into some tequila."

He blinked at them, waiting for some sort of punch line. "And?"

Stefan pinched the bridge of his nose. "And Bonnie can _not_ handle tequila."

"Like at all."

"Not even a little."

Damon's stare lit with amusement, body lounging back against the fridge. "What, does she turn into some spring break Girl Gone Wild?"

"More like the Incredible Hulk."

"Or Mr. Hyde."

He just stared at them, unable to process their dread. "I'm sorry, we're talking about Bonnie, right?" Stefan pressed his lips together, knowing where this was going. "Curls, button-nose, about the size of a minion?"

"Just get ready," Caroline muttered, shaking her head, and Damon snorted, still thrown by their reaction.

"I'll try."

Stefan glanced at Caroline. "How long has it been?"

She shot a worried glance at the clock. "About a minute."

He sighed. "Nine more minutes of peace left, then. Enjoy it."

And like clockwork, _just_ as the minute hand passed over its second number, the girl in question remerged into the kitchen. Her robe was abandoned and her slippers suddenly didn't match, and unsurprisingly, the first thing she did was make a straight shot for the bottle of tequila.

"Bonnie," Stefan said in a warning tone as she unscrewed the cap and tossed it over her shoulder, "I know you think you're fine, but—"

"Nah, you want to know what I think?" she cut in, lowering the bottle to smile at him, and yep.

Yep, they were fucked.

"I think that I chased _your_ drunk ass through a blizzard," she jabbed the bottle at him, sloshing the liquid, "I think I saved _your_ drunk ass from a friggin' serial killer," she switched the bottle over to Caroline, "and I think I did all of the above _plus_ spent an hour pulling shards of glass from the hand," the Cuervo handle took a wild swing toward Damon, "of Magic Mike over here, soooooo ultimately…" she brought the bottle up in toast before taking a long, terrifying swig, face screwing up in disgust as it scorched down her throat, "I think I've earned this shit."

She took a beat to recover, shaking her head to cast off the burn, and after a few seconds, her eyes flickered open, bleary stare taking care to graze over all three faces in the room. Her lips pulled into an innocent curl.

"Any more objections?"

 _A/N: Chapter Nine has arrived and it's brought Drunk!Bonnie with it. The dynamics are slowly but surely a-changin' - Steroline's settling into something, Bamon's big!banging into something else, and Never Have I Ever's up next! Hope you guys liked the chapter - drop a line if you can and let me know what you thought! I tried to switch up the structure from a few big scenes to interwoven shorter ones so hopefully that worked. Next chapter might take me a hot minute because there's a lot going on but I'll do what I can :)_


	10. Gotta Raise a Little Hell

_Six Mornings After_

Chapter Ten: Gotta Raise a Little Hell

* * *

It took exactly two hours for Bonnie to go missing.

No one was entirely sure how it happened, since Stefan and Caroline had been watching her like a hawk. They'd managed to stop her from everything else: ordering 75 copies of 'Cookin' with Coolio' off Amazon, turning her Facebook into an online Burn Book, playing darts with giant kitchen knives and her poster of 'Anatomy Andrew', wiring $7,500 to a Japanese scam site for a Saber-Toothed Tiger ('it's free shipping!'), but somehow, in a disappearing act of superhuman proportions, she'd managed to slip out of the apartment undetected.

And now it was DEFCON 1 up in this bitch.

"Did you check the fire escape?"

"Of course I checked the fire escape _do_ _you think this is a game_?"

"Can you check it again?"

"I've checked it three times!"

"She might've climbed down it, Caroline, just check it again!"

" _You_ check it again!"

"I'm going to go check the laundry room!"

" _Also_ already checked there—noticing a pattern?"

"Yeah: you _not re-checking the fire escape_."

"You don't think I'm checking well enough!"

"I would if you would just _re-check the friggin' fire esca—"_

"Jesus Christ," Damon snapped, cutting through Stefan's flaring tenor as he lifted his head off the sofa. Stefan and Caroline had spent the past hour roving around the building like some defective Search & Rescue edition of Barbie and Ken, and apparently that required nonstop arguing. "You guys spend more time yelling about where to look than actually looking—just shut the hell up and move."

"Wouldn't kill you to help," Caroline bit back and Damon scoffed, lifting a hand up to pinch the bridge of his nose.

"In my state, Goldilocks, breathing is almost killing me."

"Saves us the trouble, I guess."

He flicked up a pointer finger. "Rude."

"We could really use the help, Damon," Stefan sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. "I know you think it's a joke, but Bonnie's not all there right now and she could get into some serious trouble."

Damon snorted. "Honestly, a little trouble would probably do her good."

"Trust me," Stefan said, shooting him a sharp look, "not this kind."

"He's right," Caroline added, and he shot a tired thumb in her direction.

"And we all know she doesn't say that lightly."

She scoffed at the comment. "Dramatic, much?"

 _"I'm_ dramatic?" he countered, turning to stare at her. _"_ You've been telling me I killed Bonnie for twenty minutes _strai—_ "

"It's your fault she's missing!"

"You didn't tell me we were switching!"

"It was on the schedule!"

"You didn't tell me there was a schedu _—"_

"I'm going to go check the fire escape," Damon cut in flatly, wincing as he forced himself up to his feet. God, he was hungover. He'd seen it coming—hangovers always caught up with him all at once, and he'd been drunk five nights in a row at this point—but hell if that made it any better. His blood felt thin and watery, senses ultra-heightened, and a sharp throb was blaring at his temples. The rumble of pointless arguing sparked back up in the background just as he swept through Caroline's door and he flung it shut behind him to cut it off.

Silence fell over him in a welcome hush. He closed his eyes and reveled in the serenity of the dark room.

A pair of giant green eyes was staring straight back at him when he opened them.

" _Jesus_ , _"_ he said with a jolt, and Bonnie merely blinked at him, barely a foot away, entirely unfazed. "Where the hell did you come from?"

She shrugged. "Fire escape."

He scoffed at the irony, reaching up to rub his pulsing temple. "Match point: Stefan." She continued staring at him, gaze almost reptilian in its lazy curiosity, and he briefly wondered if she was still planning on being all weird around him. They hadn't really interacted since their little towel run-in earlier, and for whatever reason, him not buying her whole well-adjusted act seemed to be getting really under her skin.

Honestly, he didn't know why she was being so reactionary about it. It was obvious as hell.

Right off the bat, she'd immediately tried to get a deeper read on him—flag one. Talking about her parent shit purely in the context of trying to comfort _him_ —flag two. Fixating so much on Stefan and Caroline's drama and being fundamentally convinced they need her help—flag three. Caring a hundred times more about her friends' breakups than her own—flag four, and incidentally, the clincher of his diagnosis, because that was the precise moment he realized that for all her compassionate mothering shit, she stayed distant as hell from people.

She was a classic fixer—lost herself in everyone else's problems but never talked about her own, doled out advice about things without applying it to herself, kept people close but not close enough to analyze her back. It wasn't anything new. He'd seen it a thousand times. Six years in the foster system had given him a front row seat to every coping mechanism in the book, and she was a textbook Ms. Fix It. How else could she be with someone for two years and not give a single fuck that it was over? She was just as detached as he was.

Difference was he didn't lie to himself about it, whereas she wasn't even willing to admit what was really bothering her about last night. 'Invading her personal space' his ass—the night was a blur, but he remembered enough to know when her face had changed. It wasn't when he'd cornered her. It was when he'd said she was just as screwed up as he was.

Question was had she gotten over it yet, 'cause he really wasn't in the mood to deal with drama.

He waved a hand behind him. "Everyone's looking for you."

She snorted at the comment, as if it was the dumbest thing in the world. "That's the point of hide-and-seek, _duuuuh_."

His brow ticked upward. "Pretty sure you're the only one playing that."

"You just said they were looking."

"Rephrase: pretty sure you're the only one voluntarily pla—"

"Why are you rubbing your head?"

He dropped the hand that'd been absently massaging his temple. "Headache."

"From what?"

"This conversation."

"Do you have any weed left?"

He squinted at the pivot. "What?"

" _Weed_ —you know," she pinched an imaginary blunt between her fingers and brought it up to her lips, sucking so loudly that she looked like a wheezing grandma, "marijuana. Reefer. Gaaaaaaaanja, mon."

She did a weird little body roll of a dance move and what the fuck even _was_ that accent, Jamaican? "No," he said, shaking his head a bit to clear the fuzz, "Stefan killed the only blunt I— _ow_!"

"Shhhhh!"

"What _the—"_

 _"SHHHHH,"_ she snapped again after _literally pummeling him_ , forcing him backward like one of those tackling dummies until his unsteady, loping stride had him bursting back-first through the closet door. A blinding flare of pain shot through his head and what the _fuck_ , he did _not_ sign up fo—

 _"_ Shut up, they're coming!" she hissed as his back hit the shelves lining the back of the walk-in closet with a sharp _thud._

"Damon?" a muffled voice called from somewhere in the room, and before he could even blink, a wild hand flew up to cover his mouth.

"Where'd he go?" another voice snapped, this one distinctly Caroline's, and he heard a harassed sigh.

"I don't know."

"Literally is _anyone_ capable of following a plan!?"

"For the love of God, Caroline, I didn't _know_ there was plan."

"I _told_ you—"

"You didn't—"

The voices swiftly dimmed into a jumble as the two set off down the hallway, and Damon immediately lifted a hand to swat Bonnie's off his face with a bewildered scowl. "Can we revisit the fact that you're _not actually playing hide-and-seek_?"

" _Ummmm_ , yes I am?"

" _Ummmm_ , that involves everyone playing being aware that they're playing?"

She gave a theatrical scoff. "What are you, the hide-and-seek police?" Her hand flew up to pinch her nose and make her voice nasally. " _Briiiiiing, briiiiiing_ —yes, hello, 911, I have a SUPER emergency, someone's breaking the hide-and-seek laws and _this INJUSTICE CANNOT STA—"_

"Okay, Jesus, enough," he muttered as he made to leave the closet, the shrillness of her voice like nails on a chalkboard to his oversensitive ears, but just as he brushed past her someone swept back into the room.

She immediately grabbed a fistful of his shirt and shoved him back against the shelves.

 _"_ Fucking _hell_ ," he hissed under his breath as his head nearly split from the jerky motion, baffled as to where this strength of hers was coming from—she had the build of a friggin' fourth grader, like how was this even _possible_? " _Witchy_ , I swear to God—"

A finger immediately landed against his mouth, presumably to get him to keep quiet, and honestly, the effort would've been laughable if it weren't followed up by the sudden, disorienting press of her body against his.

His mind instinctively blanked.

The hangover, the headache, the vexation—poof, bye, lost in the span of a second to reflex, to the feeling of warm curves against responsive skin.

Of pliant against hard.

Of petite against broad.

Of swell against dip.

Of give against take.

He formally retracted his build-of-a-fourth-grader comment.

Distantly, somewhere in the room, he heard Caroline grumbling something about a basement, and equally as distantly, he was aware of that fact that Bonnie's intentions here were 100% Rambo and 0% Mrs. Robinson. Unfortunately, none of that stopped the darkening of his eyes, the uptick in his pulse, or the slow, raw charge tightening his skin.

He was a hot-blooded male with a body flushed up against his, like hungover or not, how else could this really go?

A muffled 'bang' sounded near the closet door and she shifted against him, head canting to the side to hear better over her shoulder. His jaw ticced at the friction, brain struggling to reconcile his irritation with his sudden arousal—honestly, he was too hungover for this. A minute or so of silence passed, giving him a brief window to adjust to the situation, though just as he'd started to get a grip, she slid her gaze back onto his.

Even in the dark, they were a sharp, feline green. Clever. Confident. But there was something else there now, something he hadn't caught before his eyes had adjusted to lack of light. Wily. Dangerous. A glinting threat to raise hell if him or anyone else got in her way. And _fuck_ if it wasn't a turn on.

The finger resting against his mouth was slowly starting to become a problem, too, since he felt himself getting hyperaware of it. The things he could do with it. The things it could do to him. The things he could do with his own fingers, things that would make hers curl into desperate fists against his sheets, heat her warm body to a searing burn, call the bluff in those eyes, tease her, goad her, frustrate her, force her to deliver on her threat and—

The finger dropped from his lips.

His jaw clenched, eyes blinking a few times to clear his head.

He needed space. And Advil. Lots of Advil. Dunk in the snow wouldn't hurt, either.

"Think she's gone," she murmured, voice entirely unaffected, and the nonchalance helped his irritation re-take the reigns.

"Great, think I'll join he—" Up went the silencing finger, her hovering frame once again surging against his, and his eyes veered ceiling-ward. "Witchy, if you don't back the hell up in the next ten seconds, we're going to have an uninvited guest show up that, on the plus side, is _very_ interested in playing hide-and-seek with you."

She frowned at him for a moment, unable to decipher the comment until something clicked in her eyes, and she dropped them down to their joined hips. He expected her to jolt back, grimace, jump away, something—but to his surprise, she merely snorted. It was an irreverent sound, entirely void of any alarm, and when her gaze flicked back up to his, it was full of derisive humor. "Wow _._ " His brows dove downward, thrown by the reaction. "Like I knew you were easy, but," she let out a messy chuckle, dropping her finger from his mouth, " _wow_."

His brows lifted. "Wow?"

"You're getting hard over _this_?"

"You're literally pressing me up against a closet wall."

"Right, which is all hot in movies but leeeeetz be real, that's about it."

His eyes flickered with bewilderment. "I've had plenty of sex up against a wall."

"Yeah, but that's _you_."

"So?"

"Oh, _shut_ up," she scoffed, and again, despite his dour mood, he couldn't help but find her sudden bluntness weirdly sexy. "You're Captain Coitus, like you've probably sexed up half the surfaces in Boston. Noooot exactly a reliable point of reference."

"I'm sorry, _Captain Coitus_?"

"You're an outlier, buddy. Outlier Joe."

"Outlie—what part of your brain is green lighting these?"

"A Horny McHornster," she pressed on, blithely unperturbed, "the infamous Boston Banger. A regular," she lifted her hands up into finger guns that hit up against his chest and adopted some atrocious version of a cowboy accent, " _Randy Ranger_."

His stare was dead flat. "Please leave the nicknaming to me."

She scrunched her nose in consideration. "Boston Banger might be a little serial-killery."

"Is there a reason you haven't backed up yet?"

"What's your routine?"

He blinked at the sudden change of topic, struggling to keep up with her token drunk person ADD. She was scattered and curvy and smelled like coconut and tequila and under any other circumstances, he'd be enjoying the hell out of this, but right now he was sober and reasonably certain he was dying so all this was doing was confusing the hell out of him. "My what?"

"Your routine for getting all these people to sleep with you, like it can't just be that your tall and rich and pretty."

"You forgot charming."

Bonnie snorted. "You're not charming."

"And yet," his face took on an expression of mock-bewilderment, "you _still_ haven't backed up."

"I wanna see them."

"See _what_?"

"Your moves."

"I don't have 'moves'."

"Yeah you do, you're a total Move Guy. Moves McPherson."

"What did I say about nicknames?"

"M _oooOOOooo_ ves like Jagger," she said, waggling her eyebrows and doing the wave with her arms, and in a wonderfully confusing development, it was both the nerdiest thing he'd ever seen and a complete turn-on since the movement jostled her hips against his.

"I don't—"

"Move-itize me, Captain."

"Are you quoting _Captain Crunch_?"

She shook her head, arms still undulating in a hippie wave. "Captain _Coitus_."

"Well, I walked right into that one."

"We. Want. Moves."

"Bonnie—"

"WE. WANT. MOVES. _WE. WANT—_ "

He winced at the volume shift, lifting a hand. " _Okay_ , alright, fine."

She immediately stopped her dancing, straightening up and regarding him with a blunt stare. "Go."

"For starters," he muttered, grabbing her shoulders and forcing her to take a step back. His body immediately craved the plaint warmth of hers and he ignored it. "I need to be able to think."

"This seems like an inefficient start."

"Well, generally by the time a girl's draped all over me in a closet, I don't need 'moves', so," he countered irritably, and she pursed her lips in thought.

"Fair. So what's step one?"

He let out a vexed sigh, unable to believe he was doing this. Did he even have a routine? Honestly, that made it sound a hell of a lot more elaborate than it was; mostly it was just finding someone after the same thing he was and rolling with it. "Step one is…" he cast a vague hand up, trying to tap into what went through his head at a bar, "I find someone fun."

Her brows lifted. "Fun."

"Yeah, loose, sexy, out for a good time. Anyone else is going to be drama, and—"

"—'you don't do drama'," she mocked, hands flying up into air quotes, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

"Right."

"What's step two?"

He shrugged, stare frank. "I guess I find a way to get them alone."

"Creepy."

His eyes rolled. "By catching them when they're ordering a drink, or bumping into them on their way to the dance floor, or any number of things that don't involve 20-to-life if you get caught."

"Still creepy."

" _Third_ ," he pressed on, realizing that he did actually have a bit of a routine, the more he thought about it, "I strike up a conversation that has nothing to do with them."

Her face scrunched. "The hell does that mean?"

"I point out something happening – a cougar making her rounds at the bar or someone going apeshit on the dance floor – something that feels like I would've said it to anyone around me so they don't feel targeted or like I'm hitting on them."

"And how exactly does that get you in their pants?"

His lips quirked. "Because I'm _very_ charming." She blinked at him and he sighed. "And because after the initial comfort of not feeling hit on, they start wondering _why_ I'm not hitting on them, and the longer I take to do it, the more they start actively wanting me to."

Her eyes flashed slightly, mouth rounding into a loopy 'ooooooo'. "Jedi mind-tricks."

"Or just understanding human nature."

"Then what?"

His pursed his lips, stare lifting in thought. "Honestly, from there it's pretty easy. Buy 'em a drink, keep it fun, wait for them to get all handsy if it hasn't happened already, and then…" he shrugged, dropping his stare back down to hers, "make it clear what you want."

Her gaze glinted as it held his, bright in the surrounding darkness. The goading quality was slowly coming back, sharp and curious and swirling within the green, and it was just as much of a wildly inconvenient turn-on as it'd been a few minutes ago. "And how do you do that?"

His stare lingered on the drawling way her mouth was moving. "Extremely effectively."

Her brows arched slightly, lips tipping into a smirk. "Sounds aggressive."

"Usually is."

"Also sounds like a lot of work." The air was starting to charge a bit around them. "Your whole approach, I mean."

He shrugged, gaze still fixed to her mouth. "It's only work if you don't enjoy it."

"I'd get tired."

"Not with me."

"Especially with you."

His lips twitched and he head canted to the side. "What's your approach, then?"

She arched a brow. "Sorry?"

"You heard all about my 'moves', so let's hear yours." He shrugged. "Super hot dude hanging by the bar, sexy, confident, a lot like me—what's the Judgy game plan?"

She snorted. "Nothing, 'cause I wouldn't care."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I go out to dance and let loose with friends, not prey on drunk dudes."

"So there's been _no_ point in your life where you've picked up a stranger and taken him ho—"

"I didn't say that."

There was a sharpness to the answer that surprised him a little. He didn't know what to make of it, so he brushed it off.

"Alright, and that one time—"

"Lot more than once."

His brows raised a bit. Had Prudey gone through a one-night-stand phase or something? Interesting. "Alright, so during this _era_ of yours, what was your approach?" She merely held his expectant stare, seemingly debating whether to answer, and his expression grew smug. He knew it. She could dish it but she couldn't take it. "What, did you shoot off sexy science trivia?" Her gaze narrowed at the mockery. "Diagnose them with something? Put on one of your accents?" A dark chuckle slipped into his voice. "Seriously, tell me—in fact, _show_ me and I'll see if I can resist it."

Her lips thinned. "Well, it was a long time ago, but from what I remember, I pretty much skipped straight to the making it clear what I wanted."

And without any kind of warning, her hand slipped down between them and took a hard, unapologetic fistful of his cock.

His entire body stiffened, half-formed grin snagging on his mouth.

Nerve-endings. All he was in that moment was nerve-endings. Raw, firing, naked nerve-endings, shooting off chemicals and blowing out his pupils, rerouting all of the blood in his body to the very thing caught in her hand.

Her voice eased into a murmur. " _Extremely effectively_."

And then before he could so much as blink, she'd dropped her hand, whirled around, and waltzed out of the closet, entire countenance carefree as a bird. "I'm tired of hide-and-seek. CAROLINE!" she called, slipping out of the room and into the hallway, an impending natural disaster waiting to happen, and for a minute Damon merely stood alone in the closet, pulse elevated, rock-hard, trying to settle the adrenaline surging through his veins.

Welp.

There was a slight chance he'd underestimated the Drunk Bonnie situation.

And possibly just Bonnie in general.

* * *

"Bonnie?"

"Bon?"

"Are you in here?"

The basement's only reply was echoing silence, and Caroline felt her skin crawl as Stefan slowly panned a flashlight around, illuminating all its creepy nooks and crannies. She hated their basement—it was disgusting, the lights never worked, the water heater sounded like a screeching ghoul whenever someone took a shower, and she was 99% sure it was where Kai stashed his bodies.

"If you think we're playing a game, Bon, we give up, you win."

"You _totally_ win."

"We forfeit."

"And we promise we won't be mad that we had to spend an hour looking fo—" a shriek cut through her words as a small, rodent-y shadow raced across the floor about ten feet away, streaking right through the flashlight's frame of light. "BITCH, I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU'RE IN HERE AND YOU'RE MAKING ME GO INTO A RAT-INFESTED BASEMENT JUST TO FIND YOU I WILL—"

A sharp nudge cut her off, and she whirled around to the sight of Stefan giving her a ' _really_?' look. "Not helping."

"That was a _rat_ , Stefan!" she hissed, entire body feeling like it was turning inside out. "As in rabies and winding tails and the _Bubonic friggin' Plague_."

"Well, technically the plague was—"

"If you finish that sentence with 'from their fleas' like it makes a _shred_ of difference _I will feed you to the haunted water heater_."

His mouth fell closed, lips pursing slightly.

She took in a deep, shaky breath, closing her eyes to try and re-center herself. This was okay. This was fine. She was doing this for Bonnie, who she loved to death and would do anything for, who had taken care of her drunk ass more times than she could count, who was currently putting her in a position where she was _stuck in a disease-infested basement_ with no _light,_ no _heat,_ and a guy who did _weird things_ to her better judgme—

Her eyes flew open.

No. You know what? She was fine.

She _had_ this.

Bring it, basement.

"Let's just get this over with," she muttered, turning back around to face the dark abyss in front of them with as steady a pulse as she could muster. She'd _never_ gone deeper than the fuse box before, and that was right next to the door. She never thought she'd have to, and yet here they were. Going in. Entering the Heart of Darkness.

And possibly the Blair Witch's Boston vacation home.

"Bon?" she called a bit thinly, taking her first step past the ring of light spilling in from the hallway. A shiver ran down her body from the chill in the room, and she mentally cursed herself for not bringing her jacket—she'd gone back to her room for her shoes, she could've easily grabbed it, but _no_ , of course she'd decided to take on the world's creepiest basement in a big, drafty sweater and pair of Uggs.

 _Uggs_ , though. Like she was officially the basic bitch that died first in every horror movie—all she was missing was the Starbucks, the infinity scarf, and the inexplicable need to take a shower in a life-or-death situation.

"Bonnie?" Stefan called out from right behind her, causing her to jolt up and shoot a bewildered look over her shoulder.

"Don't _do_ that!"

He frowned. "Do what?"

"Go all radio silence and then pop up right behind me!"

"Caroline, you've literally taken one step—where else would I be?"

"I don't know, maybe you decided to split up!"

"I'm holding a flashlight, you'd see me wherever I—"

"Just—" she waved a skittish hand, "don't do it again."

He raised his palms in surrender, slicing a streak of light over the room. "Okay." She detected a vague hint of amusement in his voice, and it made her eyes slit.

This was _not_ funny.

This was creepy and life-threatening and likely a crime scene, but _sure_ , yuck it up.

She clenched her jaw as she whirled back around, forcing herself to continue forward. God, they had so much ground to cover. If they found Bonnie giggling behind some anthrax-infested shelf like this was _all a game_ she might actually kill her. But then again, what if she'd passed out? Tripped on something? Hit her head, inhaled some fumes—her eyes grew wide: what if Kai had stashed her here?

"You're _sure_ Kai didn't have her?" she shot over her shoulder.

"Pretty sure."

"How sure?"

"I checked the whole apartment."

"Yeah, but if _anyone_ has trap doors and secret rooms, it's him."

"I mean, if you want to go back there for round two, be my guest, but be prepared to have him walk you through the finer points of live organ remova— _careful_!"

She jumped at the sudden hand on her shoulder, body going rigid in terror. "What? _What is it_? Spider!? Rat!? SPIDER-RAT HYBRID OH MY GOD KILL I—"

" _Caroline,_ relax, it's a step," he cut in, angling the flashlight down to where her foot was hovering above a series of five or so descending steps. She let out a slow, shaky breath, lips pressing together in a paper-thin line.

"Right."

"Didn't want you to fall."

"Mm-hmm." She balled her hands into tight fists and forced herself to shake it off, throwing her chin up for confidence. "Good catch. Thanks."

"Sure," came the reply, and there it was again, the stupid little ripple of amusement. "Do you maybe want me to go ahead of you, since I have the flashlight?"

 _YES PLEASE DEAR GOD._

"No, thanks."

She could practically hear his mouth quirking. "Are you sure?"

 _NOT AT ALL._

"Completely sure," she said in a 'this doesn't bother me at all, I laugh in the face of danger, hahahaha' voice, forcing herself to continue forward. "I just got distracted is a _AHHHHH—_ "

She forgot about the steps.

After all that, _she forgot about the fucking steps._

Fortunately, Stefan's reflex game was a million miles ahead of hers and he managed to hook an arm around her waist before she could plummet into the depths of hell. Unfortunately, he had to yank her back to reverse her momentum, which meant a few seconds of chaos ended with the back of her body pinned up against the tall, hard stretch of his.

The wash of heat and familiarity was immediate.

Her pulse was racing, body charged from the adrenaline of the near-fall, and all she could process was the plane of warmth pressed against her back, ribbed with ridges she could feel even through the wool of her sweater. Her eyes flew shut: no. Nope. She'd made a pact to avoid this. Ruled it out, crossed it off her Stefan repertoire in her room that morning when she'd decided that whatever the hell it was they were doing, the physical part had to go.

There was no way around it. He'd broken almost every carefully constructed line she'd drawn around the people she hooked up with. And it wasn't like he'd just forced himself in, either, because that'd be one thing: she'd let him. She'd eased into his voice. Curled into him. Let her guard down.

She'd felt _safe_.

And she knew better. Drunk or not, she fucking _knew_ better. Nothing built on attraction was 'safe'—attraction was messy and volatile and always, _always_ motivated by a drive for sex, whether the person knew it or not. It tricked people into thinking they cared about things they didn't, made them see what they wanted to see, and lulled them into a sense of security that vanished the second someone got what they wanted from them, all in the name of getting to a bottom line.

Two years ago, she'd made a decision to only ever deal in that bottom line. Never blurred it with anything else, never fell into the emotional traps—attraction was a selfish thing, a hungry thing, and that was exactly how she navigated it. Selfishly. Bluntly. Invulnerably. Yet last night, for whatever reason, she'd broken that. He'd broken that. _Easily_ , like it'd taken him what, ten minutes to wear her down? And she didn't blame him for it—she was sure he genuinely believed he was just being a nice guy and lending an ear to someone who needed it, that it wasn't anything more complicated than that—but she knew better.

She knew that story well.

Knew how purely it started.

Knew how accidentally it continued.

Knew how one day, despite everything, you just woke up in love.

Knew the warmth and the trust, the intimacy and the flutters. Knew the quiet, giddy hum of feeling like you were half of something bigger than you, of feeling so incredibly _lucky_ all the time for something you couldn't quite explain.

Knew how impossible it was to believe anything bad could come out of it.

Knew how carelessly it ripped you to shreds anyway.

And sure, in some cases, it didn't—some people had long, happy relationships that lasted for their entire lives—but no matter how long it'd been, love always had the ability to rip you apart. At any point. At 45. At 92. From a different coast. From beyond the grave. As long as you were in love, you were living in a happiness controlled by someone else, a fanciful time bomb that, if you were lucky, would wait till you died before detonating.

Mixing emotions with attraction inevitably led to love, and despite all the bullshit poetry that claimed otherwise, love wasn't a many-splendored thing.

Love wasn't even a battlefield.

Love was letting someone hold a gun to your head because you've convinced yourself they'll never pull the trigger. And she had the bullet hole to prove it.

"You okay?"

The question drew her out of the thought spiral she hadn't even realized she'd sunken into, and she immediately cleared her throat, straightening herself up and stepping out of his grip. "Um, yeah—fine, just…" she turned around to meet his concerned gaze with a dodgy one of her own, searching for something to say, "…thanks."

His stare grew a bit scrutinizing. "Sure."

A stilted beat, and then she gestured over her shoulder. "You know, on second thought, maybe you should lead the way."

The glitter of humor slowly resurfaced in his gaze. "Sure."

"Cause like you said, you have the flashlight. Makes it so much easier."

"Sure."

"Well," she said a bit awkwardly, sweeping a hand behind her in an 'after you' motion, "take it away."

He held her gaze for another vaguely amused beat or two, causing her to fidget slightly, before glancing away and moving past her. "Sure."

Her lips pressed together in instinctive annoyance, and she wasn't ever sure why.

"There are steps here, by the way," he threw casually over his shoulder, and oh yeah, that was why—he was a little shit.

She shot his back a sarcastic smile as she descended the first one. "I'm aware."

"Third time's the charm."

She rolled her eyes, though even in her annoyance, she took care to speed up a little as they ventured deeper, never lagging more than a foot behind him. It wasn't that she was scared of the dark or anything, _obviously,_ it was ju—

He lifted a hand suddenly, body coming to a halt, and she nearly crashed into his back at the abruptness of the motion. " _Jesus_ , Ste—"

"You hear that?" he murmured, tense voice slicing right through hers, and she quieted briefly, straining her ears in the silence. Nothing.

"I don't—" She jumped as a low, muffled bang hit her ears, seemingly coming from somewhere in the back, and ooooh, _no_. No, no, no. She didn't like this. Nope.

"Bonnie?" Stefan called, swinging the flashlight in the sound's general direction, and after an extended silence, took a step toward it.

"What are you doing?" she whispered, eyes flaring wide, and he took another cautious step forward.

"Checking it out."

"Are you _crazy?_ " she hissed, voice tinny with disbelief. "Stefan, this is how people die in movies!"

"Well, good thing we're not in movie."

"Ever heard of art imitating life?"

He snorted. "You can stay here, Caroline, I'll go."

"Oh, _hell_ no," she snapped, surging forward in the dark to grab onto his shoulders. "You are _not_ leaving me alone, I'm wearing Ugg boots!'

"What does tha—" a hiss sliced through his words as she dug her nails into his skin, reacting to another muffled bang in the distance. " _Christ_ , Caroline."

"There is a _serial_ killer back there, Stefan!"

"You mean your neighbor?"

"No, a different one!"

"So you just happen to live in a building with two serial killers?"

She gave a blustery scoff. "Weirder things have happened! Maybe this is their hangout—maybe this is where they meet up to discuss murder strategies and map out their turf so they don't both show up at the same hou—"

Another bang, and this time she physically jumped him, arms wrapping around his shoulders in a fierce cling that had him stumbling forward a few steps.

" _Caroli—"_

"Go back!"

"It might be Bonnie."

"Too bad!"

"We have to make sure," he insisted, and hold the fucking phone, was that _laughter_ texturing his voice!? She reared back and shoved his shoulder.

"Are you _enjoying_ this?"

"'Course not."

"This isn't funny, Stefan!"

"Not at all."

"I'm not kidding!"

"Neither am I," he said, voice totally deadpan. "We need to find out if this is Bonnie's idea of hide-and-seek or just a rare sighting of the infamous Spider-Rat hybri—"

She punched his shoulder again and he broke into a laugh, shoulders shaking a bit beneath her grip. Her nostrils flared in fury—HOW WAS THEIR IMPENDING DEATH FUNNY, LIKE? "I just want you to know," she hissed directly into his ear, "that when we get back there and there's a dude with a chainsaw, I'm shoving you at him and saving myself."

"Why're you so sure it's a guy?" he asked casually.

"Because women aren't brainwashed into homicidal power hunger by hyper-masculinity."

That's right, she was a feminist even in a _motherfucking crisis_ , #recognize.

He seemed satisfied enough with the answer, steadily easing them forward, and after a few stubborn seconds, she resigned to the fact that they weren't leaving until they found out what was back there.

Or, you know, just ever.

* * *

"—LET'S GOOOOOOO. (LET'S GOOOOOO). IF YOU WANT IT YOU CAN GET IT LEMME KNOOOOOW. (LET ME KNOW). I'M BOUT TO—"

Silence.

"MMMMMM MMMMM MMMMMM MMMMMM MMMMMM MMMMMM. Let me talk to ya. Let me talk to ya. (Let it rain). MMMMMMM MMMMMM MMMMMMM MMMMMMM MMMMMM—"

Silence.

"Bye, bye, bye. BYE BYEEEEEEE. BYE BYEEEEEEEE. _I'm_ doing this tonight. _You're_ probably gonna start a fight. _I_ know this can't be—"

Silence.

"Ahahahahaha. YO, I'LL TELL YOU WHAT I WANT, WHAT I REALLY REALLY WANT. SO TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, WHAT YOU REALLY REALLY WANT. I'LL TELL YOU WHAT I—"

Damon threw his hands up from the armchair he was collapsed against. "Just pick a fucking song!"

"Too many good ones!" came the distant reply, and before he knew it, the opening bellow of 'Circle of Life' was crashing over the living room, drawing his eyes into a wince. Christ, what had he done to deserve this? But really?

"Can you at _least_ turn the volume down?"

" _What_?"

" _Can you at least turn the volume down_?" he yelled over the music, and after a few seconds, the thunderous noise dropped to a slightly more tolerable decibel. He let out a steely sigh, bringing his hand up to rub against his forehead. "Thank you."

"I can't believe you just asked me to turn down the Lion King."

"Kid, Pavarotti could rise from the dead right now just to sing me an aria and I would punch him in the face."

"One does not simply," she spent a hot minute struggling to get up to her feet before swinging a dramatic arm into the air, " _ask someone to_ _turn down the Lion King_! _"_

He merely stared at her from his chair, entirely deadpan. He'd never encountered _quite_ her brand of drunk before: she was like this unapologetically nerdy, meme-spouting, accent-loving weirdo with a penchant for spastic dance moves, and also a sexy little demon with shit-starter eyes who just wanted to watch the world burn.

Simultaneously. In equal parts. It was ridiculous.

"Let's have a dance party," she said, transitioning into some sort of interpretative dance, and he replied with a mirthless smile.

"No."

"Get up," she insisted, dipping her head back into a fluid arc that had her hair sweeping against the floor, hands undulating above her body, and he was surprised to find that she actually moved like a dancer. Flowing, strong, controlled.

"Pass."

" _Daaaaa-mooooon_."

"What."

"Come dance!"

He scoffed at the demand. "I can barely stand."

"It can be a slow dance!"

He snorted— _right_ , 'cause what he really needed was another situation where she was all handsy and pressed up against him. "Hard pass."

"I thought you were supposed to be the fun one," she whined, swinging a leg out into an effortless spin, and he scoffed, knocking his head back against the armchair.

"Hungover trumps fun, sweetheart."

She eased her spin into a surprisingly steady halt given her blood alcohol level and heaved a gusty sigh, hands coming up to her hips. "Then you leave me no choice."

His brow furrowed. "What does that—"

"THIS IS THE SONG THAT NEVER EEEEEEEEEEEEEENDDDDDS."

Kill him.

"AND IT GOES ONNNNNN AND ONNNNNN MY FRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENDS."

Literally kill him.

"SOME PEOPLE STARTED SINGING IT NOT KNOWING WHAT IT WAS."

"Bonnie—"

"AND THEN THEY KEPT ON SINGING IT FOREVER JUST BECAUSE THIS IS THE SOOOOOOONG THAT NEEEEEEEVER EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNDSSSS."

She started prancing around the armchair in some sort of tribal dance and he pinched the bridge of his nose.

"AND IT GOES OOOONNNNN AND OOOOONNNN MY FRIEEEEEEEEENDS!"

Jesus _Christ_ , his head.

"SOME PEOPLE STAAAAAARTED SINGING IT NOT KNOWING WHAT IS WAS, AND THEY KEPT ON SINGING IT FOREVER JUST BE—"

" _One_ dance."

She came to an immediate halt in front of him, flailing limbs dropping to her sides so abruptly it was like a switch had been flipped. "Great!"

He couldn't believe he was doing this. "And I get to pick the music."

"Sure."

"And you have to promise to keep all of… _that_ ," he growled, giving a vague gesture at her concealed weapon of a body, "a reasonable distance away."

Her eyes took on a slight glitter. "Who's the prude now?"

He grudgingly forced himself up to his feet and the effort was akin to pulling his own battered body out of the wreckage of a five-car pileup. "Phone," he muttered, holding a resigned hand out, and she handed it over with eager-beavery anticipation.

His lips pressed into a flat line as he scrolled through her Spotify. Where the hell were Stefan and Caroline? Like in an apartment full of three best friends and one stranger, how was _he_ the one stuck drunksitting? Outrageous.

"Chingy?" he muttered, arching a brow at her list of recently played artists. "Chamillionaire? Samantha Mum—are you like stuck in a time warp where it's 2004?"

"Those are my throwback jams."

He gave a derisive snort. "Throwback means the 90s. Tupac, TLC, Biggie."

"Throwback means whatever makes me wanna _throw this ass back_."

He continued to scroll, expression growing more and more bewildered as the artists grew progressively more outdated and one-hit-wondery. "This is legitimately the worst music library I've ever seen."

"Type something in," she offered, entirely unbothered, and her shoulders started to bop up and down in an improvised rhythm.

" _Lil_ Bow Wow?" He glanced up at her in bafflement. "He wasn't even Bow Wow yet?"

" _Hey, ma, wassup, let's slide, alright, alright,"_ she sang in tribute, easing into a shoulder shimmy as she began taking loose, hip-winding steps backwards. " _And we gon' get it on toniiiight_. _"_

"That's not even Bow Wow," he said, gaze lit with disbelief. "'Lil' or otherwise."

"Juuuuust pick somethiiiiiing," she whined, hands swinging up into a zippy snap and Christ, was that the Carlton dance?

He dropped his stare back to the screen with a long-suffering look, scrolling for a few more seconds before double-tapping on the only song he could actually stand. A brief toss had the phone on the couch, and he heaved a tired sigh before swinging his gaze up to meet hers.

She was standing about five feet away from him, petite frame clad in a ratty tank top, plaid boxer shorts, and a pair of egregiously mismatched slippers, and when the trilling opening of 'I'll Be Seeing You' crackled to life over the living room, the notes elegant and fluttering, he found the contrast it struck with her disheveled appearance to be oddly… charming. He'd always associated Billie Holiday with wine, smoky rooms, and rain winding down foggy windowpanes, yet here she was, crooning to a girl with a cow head on one foot and a dragon head on the other. It added a wink of humor to her lilting voice.

Bonnie's brows shot up after a few seconds. "Seriously?"

"What?"

"The _Notebook_ song?"

His brow furrowed. "The _what_?"

"The one they play in The Notebook!"

He blinked at her. "This is Billie Holiday."

" _Nooooo,_ this is the Notebook song," she corrected with an implied 'obviously', and he merely stared at her, unable to figure out if she actually thought the song was only famous because of some shitty movie. "You _totally_ like The Notebook."

His face crumpled. "I've never even seen it."

" _Suuuuure_ ," she said, taking the opportunity to waltz up to him, and his brows snapped upward.

"You seriously don't know Billie Holiday?"

"I know The Notebook," she countered in a sing-song voice, easing to halt about a half-foot away and thrusting their height difference into sudden, glaring relief, "and something tells me you do, too." She had to tilt her head _way_ back to even attempt to meet his gaze, and the angle invited the overhead light into her eyes, brightening them to a light, lemony green. Her brow furrowed suddenly. "You're quite tall."

"You're quite small."

"This feels like a problem."

"Welp, we tried—bummer."

She ignored him, stubbornly kicking her slippers off, and after a beat, he felt the light pressure of her bare feet stepping onto the tops of his. His stare couldn't help but flare with amusement—she had to be kidding. This was literally what little kids did. Her hands shot up to grab his shoulders for balance, and after a wobbly moment of adjustment, she swung her satisfied gaze back up to his.

"Much better."

"You gained _maybe_ and inch."

"Yep."

"Which is probably what the slippers were giving you anyway."

"Let's move."

"I'm failing to see the role you play in this particular setup."

"Up and at 'em, tiger."

"Like you literally just dumped all the work on me."

"Giddy up."

"I could waltz us off the fire escape and you'd have no say—I could foxtrot you over the balcony in the hallway."

"I trust you, now _come on_ ," she groaned, jostling his shoulders, and he sighed, lifting his hands up to the curve of her waist and pulling her in a bit. Her skin was warm against his fingers, the heat easily penetrating through the thin cotton of her tank top, and he wondered if she always ran this hot or if it was just all the alcohol and dancing. He eased them into a sleepy rhythm, bodies drifting from side to side, and after a few sways, her face broke into a bright grin. "I used to do this with Joe all the time."

His brow furrowed. "Joe?"

"Sorry—Stefan's dad," she clarified, gaze faraway and bright, and despite the seeming joy of her presumptive trip down memory lane, he observed her with a drawn look. So Stefan was that friend. The fantasy family friend. "God, I was obsessed with ballroom dance when I was little."

He arched a derisive brow. "What do you mean, 'when' you were little?"

"You wanna _fight_?"

"What the hell are you now?"

"I will liquefy you."

He couldn't help but snort at the drunken belligerence, shifting his gaze back over her shoulder. "One thing at a time, Rocky."

Her battle-readiness settled after a beat, and they merely continued to sway back and forth, her feet a warm pressure against his. An odd sense of ease began softening the air around them—their mismatched frames were an unexpectedly comfortable fit, and when she wasn't whining or threatening his state of matter, the warmth and honeyed scent of her was actually kind of soothing. Against all odds, they fell into an easy silence.

It was a solid minute before Bonnie broke it. "So why do you like this song?"

He turned his head a bit to glance at her. "What?"

"This song. Like Notebook aside, it's still all romance-ish—"

"You mean romantic?"

"—and you're all 'booooo love's a myth'."

He rolled his eyes at the impression, though after a beat, his lips pursed a bit, eyes drawing in thought. It wasn't a bad question, actually. "Not really sure."

She scoffed. "Bullshit."

His brow furrowed. "No, seriously, I don't know."

"Why do you like it?"

"I don't _know_."

" _Why do you like it_?"

"I—" he lifted an exasperated hand, searching for some kind of explanation, "I don't know, I guess it just feels realer than the average ballad to me."

Her stare narrowed curiously at the answer. "Realer how?"

He sighed, wishing he didn't have to explain shit like this when his head felt like a lava lamp. "It just… alright, we as we've established _ad nauseum_ at this point, I don't really buy the whole love thing," he caught a brief flicker of her smirk from the corner of his eye, "but I _do_ think that there are people who just sort of… collide into your life. And within a really short time of knowing them, sometimes even immediately, you know that they're kind of going to be…" he shrugged, "inevitable."

A flicker of silence. And then a flat, uncomprehending, "Inevitable."

The exhalation fell thin and tired from his lips. "Yeah, like regardless of whether you want them to or not, they're going to have an impact on your life." He lifted a resigned shoulder, casting his gaze over her shoulder in thought. "Sometimes it's in a good way, sometimes it's in a bad way, but mostly," he ventured, stare clouding with a flicker of memories: a greasy man with a fistful of rings like teeth, a girl with olive skin and daredevil eyes, a little boy with a toothy grin bright enough to light the darkest of spaces, "mostly it's just a tangle of both."

A long, quiet beat fell over them, the last few bars of the song drifting into silence, and for a second, he felt a budding sense of regret over launching into all of that. It wasn't something he'd ever really vocalized before, nor was he completely convinced that's why he liked this song, but given Bonnie's little therapist kink, he was positive it was going to lead into some _super_ annoying psychoanalysis that he really didn't feel like—

"Oh, my God, you're a _mush_ ball."

His face crumpled at the blurted out words, gaze swinging down to hers. "What?"

"You're a _mush ball_ ," she repeated, voice melodic with delight, "a saptastic, feelsy, hopelessly romantic _ball_ of _mush_!"

Well, that didn't go how he'd thought it would. "How am I a—"

"You think you can go off on some tortured monologue about love and just swap in 'inevitable' for 'in love' like that changes what it's about?" she asked, lapsing into a derisive snort, and his expression flattened. "' _Inevitable_ '—I'll tell you what's inevitable: your future elaborate ass Disney wedding to the love of your friggin' life because _you_ , my friend, are an _inevitable_ mush ball _._ " She lifted a finger to tap his nose and he dodged it with a scowl.

"Really?"

"Mush ball."

His eyes rolled at the taunting tone.

" _Mush ball_."

She tapped his nose again. "Stop."

"Say it."

"No."

"Say 'I'm a mush ball!'"

He scoffed. "No."

"I'm Damon and I'm a mushball!"

He dodged her hand again. "Would you just—"

"And you want to know what else?" she goaded, voice adopting a bit of a purr, and suddenly she was moving closer, hands slipping down his neck to grab fistfuls of his collar and slowly pulling him in. It was uncanny, how abruptly the shift happened, how mercurially she flickered from obnoxious little girl to slippery vixen, no warning, no tell, just a sudden flutter of hot breath on his lips. " _You_ , Damon Whatever-the-Fuck, are going to live in the suburbs with a soccer van, 2.5 kids, a matching set of golden retrievers, and a severely judgment-impaired Mrs. Whatever-the-Fuck, and _you_ ," she murmured, tightening her grip on his collar as she pushed onto her tip-toes so she could whisper the taunt against his lips, "are going to _like_ it."

He slowly blinked at her. His felt his gaze hooding, skin tightening at the heat of her mouth so close, the sudden memory of her finger against his lips, of her hand grabbing a hard, confident fistful of him, dominant, effortless, a hand that knew what it was doing, that played innocent until you riled it up, that would feel like pure, hot friction sliding over the length of him. "Witchy," he said in a thick rumble, dark gaze fixed on hers, "I'm going to need you to take a step back."

Her lips took on a slow, flickering curl as she eased her head to the side in consideration. "You know what I need?" A blink, and then his bottom lip was between her teeth in a playful nip that was over before it'd even started. " _More tequila_."

Poof.

She was gone.

Off to the kitchen.

Right back to being all prances and weird dance moves.

He pressed his lips together for a solid thirty seconds, a lone, tensed figure in the living room. His gaze dropped to the stiffness in his pants. "Looks like it's just you and me again, buddy." He feigned a frown, leaning down a bit as if trying to hear something. "What's that? A cold shower?"

Great idea.

* * *

 _Please be Bonnie, please be Bonnie, please be Bonnie,_ Caroline pleaded as they slowed to a halt at the back of the room, stare fixed on the lit path of the flashlight. Stefan lifted it over the large, rusty pipes lining the wall, some stretching horizontally from wall to wall and others hulking from floor to ceiling, and the only response they got was the light winking back at them against the thick metal.

"Welp!" she chirped. "Looks like there's nothing here, let's go."

"Hold on," he murmured, leaning forward a bit, and she pressed her lips into a tight line, trying to keep her shit together. "Do you see that?"

"I see _literally_ nothing but us getting dismembered."

"No, Caroline, I'm serious—what is that?"

The change in his tone made her skin skitter, and she slowly rose onto her tiptoes to peek over his shoulder. Her heart stopped, brows diving into a terrified furrow—was that… _hair_? "Bonnie?" she ventured, voice little more than a peep.

And then three things happened in almost immediate succession.

1\. Someone decided to take a shower.

2\. The haunted water heater screeched to life.

3\. The unidentified source of hair shot toward them in a lightning-fast streak of black.

Caroline leapt into the air with an ear-splitting shriek, clawing her way up Stefan's back and wrapping her limbs around him like a deranged koala, and he stumbled backward at the unexpected weight, casting a wild hand out to grab something to anchor them. The flashlight managed to fall out of his hand somewhere in all the chaotic jostling, and it hit the ground with enough impact to shut off, plunging the pair into pitch darkness.

"RUN," she screeched as he struggled to stabilize them, clinging onto him in a ferocious, white-knuckled death grip that didn't care at all what it was holding.

He spat a mouthful of her hair out. " _Caroli_ —"

"PLEASE DON'T KILL US!"

" _Your hand's on my_ _ey_ —"

"I TOLD HIM NOT TO COME HERE!"

"CAROLINE, it was—"

"PLEASE JUST LET US—"

"IT WAS JUST A CAT."

Her frantic clawing stopped, silence ringing in her ears as her chest heaved against him in the darkness.

A cat.

A _cat_.

A fucking—

"Are you sure?" she demanded, body still rigidly wrapped around his, and he let out an exasperated breath.

"Yeah, it came right at me."

"So it wasn't—"

"A serial killer? No."

She swallowed a bit thickly, blinking a few times to process the information. Now that she thought about it, that was a little… small. For a serial killer. Or human, really.

"I—" she cleared her throat, "sorry."

"Can I have my eye back?"

She jolted a bit upon realizing she was still wrapped around him, immediately climbing off and getting back to her own two feet. Awkwardness suffused her as she shoved a hasty hand through her hair, thankful for the darkness swallowing them—she wasn't super keen on looking him in the eye at the moment.

"So," he ventured after a beat, and she could tell by the way the volume changed that he'd turned to face her. She took in a resigned breath, bracing herself for the inevitable mockery. "You okay?"

The question caught her off-guard, and her brows dove into a puzzled frown. "What?"

"Are you _okaaay_ ," he repeated slowly, voice adopting a playful lilt. "You were pretty freaked there."

She merely blinked at him, little more than a vague outline in the inky darkness. That was it? No demeaning little jabs? No overdone impressions? No mortifying renditions that reduced her to an even crazier, blithering idiot than she'd already made of herself? Her head briefly flickered with an image of Matt's face, gaze galling, lips curled into a—

"Caroline?"

She shook her head, hastily clearing the image. "What?"

He was silent for a beat, as if trying to puzzle out the situation, and she felt herself growing a bit tense under the blind scrutiny. "You know what, let's get out of here."

"No," she said abruptly, the over-compensatory side of her flaring. Now that the immediate sense of danger was gone, all she felt was moronic—the clinging, the jumping, the shrieking like some damsel? In the absence of all the adrenaline, it was all so… ridiculous. "No, it's fine—we still have more places to look."

He let out a low chuckle. "I think it's pretty safe to say Bonnie's not in here."

"Well, we can't be sure till we look everywhere, so," she shrugged, tone forcibly light, "let's go."

"We really don't have to—"

"Stefan, I'm not a little girl, I can handle the dark, okay?" Her voice was a little sharper than she'd meant it to be, and she felt something in the air shift between them. Tense. Sober. Her hands gathered into loose fists at her side, swinging lightly against her hips. "Earlier was just… a joke, I was being stupid."

Another silence, this one longer, and she felt her lips pressing together in discomfort. She was aware this was probably just making her look even crazier—one second she was a shrieking mess, the next she was all business, but she didn't care. She knew how easy it was to get labeled ridiculous, and once you stopped getting taken seriously, it was almost impossible to make it start again. She wasn't about to—

"My thing's heights."

Her thoughts snagged, brows lifting at the unexpected comment. "What?"

"Heights," he repeated, and her eyes fell into a squint in the darkness. "Can't stand them. To be fair, it's not as bad now as it used to be, but I did pass out once because of it." Her expression began to loosen as she realized what he was doing. "We went to this multi-level aquarium for a field trip and I took one look off the fifth floor balcony and wiped out in front of the entire class—you can ask Bonnie, she was there. Eighth grade was a rough year."

She blinked at him. "I'm not afraid of the dark, Stefan."

"I know," he said, his voice light-hearted and casual, "I just felt like sharing."

She dropped her gaze to the floor, unsure of what to do with that.

" _Annnd_ just in case some small, stubborn, very incorrect part of you happens to be in any way feeling like I might be thinking about you a certain way because you broke your fembot setting and showed a moment of what you perceive to be weakness," he tacked on, and her lips couldn't help but twitch at the shithead-iness of the wording, "I figured it could be a useful point of reference for who exactly you're dealing with. Aquarium fainter."

It took her a few seconds to reply. She didn't know what to say. The logical part of her was loud and clear: ignore it. Walls up. Good for him. Cool story, bro. But then another part of her just… didn't want to. "I mean," she began, fingers curling a bit hesitantly, "that's not _that_ bad."

He let out a dark chuckle. "Oh, it was bad. I was out for half an hour. Bodily functions were involved."

Her nose scrunched in a flicker of delighted disgust. "Oh, no."

"Oh, _yeah_ —I believe there was brief stint where I was referred to almost exclusively as Piss Pants Salvatore." She couldn't help but snort. "Pretty sure it was supposed to rhyme with 'Stefan'—I dunno, wasn't very clever, point is: you don't get to downplay my humiliation. I win, you lose, deal with it."

Her gaze brightened the slightest bit at the challenge, and she shrugged. "I don't know, I mean, eighth grade is kind of a long time ago. Not sure that trumps something that happened today."

"Oh, it happened today, too," he said blithely, and her amusement flared into an all-out laugh at the idea of him sneaking out today to go faint in the Boston aquarium, prompting a small laugh from him, too. "No but really, why do you think I didn't want to check the fire escape?"

Her laugh cut off, eyes slowly widening at the admission. " _No._ "

"Yep."

" _Seriously_?"

"Yep."

"We live on the second floor!"

"Yep."

"The snow's practically up to our floor right now!"

"Mm-hmm."

"And you still can't go out there?"

"I mean, I can, but as long as it's not necessary and I have a choice, fuck that shit."

She burst out laughing, unable to stop herself. "That's _ridiculous_."

" _Hey_ , this is supposed to be a safe space."

"Didn't you climb the Paul Revere statue the other night!?" she pressed on, completely ignoring his fake outrage, and he scoffed.

"Yeah, high out of my _mind_."

" _Yikes_ —that could've ended really badly."

"I mean, I literally fell off of it, so."

She snorted. "Oh, well then, guess it did."

"That whole night was a disaster. In fact," his voice took on a humorous layer of outrage, "why am I even going back to eighth grade? That night blows anything that just happened here completely out of the water, like I pretended I was Bruce Willis and ran around a blizzard in pajamas yelling 'Yippee-ki-yay, motherfuckers!'"

" _And_ set off fireworks in our living room."

"Yeah, but that was kind of badass."

"No, it wasn't, it was awful."

"Eh, agree to disagree."

"And what about trying to kiss me?" The easy laughter quelled, slowly slipping into something quieter, headier, more tentative. She felt the air around them take on a low hum. "Or are we still pretending that didn't happen?"

She didn't know why she'd taken it there. Her voice was easy, playful, the overall weight of the room still very much light, but it was a different kind of light. A whirring kind of light. Anticipatory. Charged with potential. Potential she'd made very clear to herself this morning that she was no longer going to explore.

The darkness of the room obscured his face, but she could feel the shift in the tension of his frame—more alert, just like hers.

"Does it matter at this point?" he said after a beat, voice quieter than it'd been before, and she offered a small shrug she knew he couldn't see.

"Matter of principle, mostly." Her voice was softer, too, and that she knew he'd catch.

"Mm." She felt the air move a bit as he eased a step closer, subtly warming the air around her. "Well in that case, I stand by my original answer."

She felt herself take a reciprocal step toward him, ignoring the warning bells going off somewhere in her head and drifting into the faceless pull of him. "And what lie was that again?"

"I believe it was," and suddenly there was the brush of a hand against her waist, slipping along blindly until it curled around the small of her back, easing her forward, "that you would know if I wanted to kiss you."

Her pulse skittered as a slow tug brought her the rest of the way up against his chest, draping her in a warmth that stirred her every last nerve-ending into a buzz. This was bad. She was losing her grip on this situation _real_ fast. She knew she needed to stop it, but _Jesus,_ despite her whole darkness anxiety there was something so outrageously sexy about the fact that she couldn't see anything—it was like every other sense was cranked up to ten.

Everything was a surprise.

He could kiss her at any moment. No warning, no tell, just a sudden heat on her mouth that wasn't there before, a hot slip of a hungry tongue. Sex would be pure sensation—every thrust of his hips, every drag of her nails, every nip of his teeth, and every fistful of her hair a sightless burst. It would be hands everywhere, mouths everywhere, like every missed visual was coded in Braille against their skin and if their fingers and tongues roved feverishly enough, they could read them.

She felt a low, familiar throb starting up between her legs and she inhaled slowly, trying to get a grip. This was ridiculous. He hadn't even kissed her yet. In fact, he wasn't _going_ to kiss her because this was not going to happen. She wasn't going to let it. And yet, when she felt the faintest shift of a jaw moving toward hers, she just—

 _YIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEE!_

The screech of the haunted water heater all but _detonated_ over the room, causing them to instinctively jolt apart, and the shock to the system was exactly what she needed—she immediately stepped out of his grip and pushed a tight hand through her hair. _Christ_ , what the hell? What had she been thinking? Literally five hours ago she'd banned this— _five hours ago_! It hadn't even been a day, like?

"I changed my mind," she said abruptly, clearing her throat to remove some of the thickness in her voice. "Bonnie's clearly not here so we need to get out, cover more ground."

"Right," he said, his own voice on the throaty side as he gave a slightly chastened chuckle, "Jesus, yeah, priorities."

"Let's go," she said, not wanting to prolong being in the charged darkness with him for any longer than necessary—she needed the harsh smack of light.

"Alright, just let me try and find the flashli—"

"Leave it, we'll get it another time," she cut in, striding straight through the inky basement to the hallway like it was a friggin' catwalk. Amazing how a new kind of anxiety could make you forget all about an old one. The wash of light was immediate in the hallway, grounding her firmly back into reality, and she took a deep breath, indulging in even the _smell_ of the room.

Alright.

Moment of weakness over.

Back to real life.

This was easy.

This was fine.

She did this all the time.

Not like Stefan was special.

"I think we should head back to the apartment next, just in case she came back," she announced in her HBIC voice, setting off up the stairs, though upon hearing no response, she paused and glanced over her shoulder.

Stefan emerged from the basement a few seconds later, flashlight in hand. He gave it a little wave before handing it to her. "Figured I'd save you the trip."

She pressed her lips together as she took it. He wanted her to not have to come back down here. It was… nice. _Whatever,_ big deal, friendly people were nice. Hell, strangers could be nice—some guy once bought Bonnie her lunch during finals week because he thought she was homeless. People were thoughtful all the time.

She cleared her throat. "So, I think we should—"

"—check back at the apartment before going anywhere else, yeah, agreed," he said, glancing up the stairs, and the way the direct hit of the light brought the jade of his eyes to gleam made her think that maybe the whole darkness thing was overra— _nope._

No.

Enough.

"Great, let's go."

She rushed up the three flights with a little more speed than absolutely necessary, hoping that a dose of Damon's droll humor could help reset her brain chemistry, but when she finally stepped back into the apartment, she found that he wasn't even necessary.

Because there was already a giant, flaming distraction in the form of Bonnie Bennett.

Literally flaming.

She'd managed to light the tequila bottle she was holding three inches from her mouth on fire.

" _Caroline_!" she cried upon spotting the horrified blonde, thrusting the bottle up in a terrifying whirl of flames. "Come join me—iz about to get _lit_."

* * *

 _AN: Welp, if you follow the tumblr ( sixmorningsafter) you know I had a wild ride getting this chapter here. First, this entire thing was supposed to be a two or so page intro to the Never Have I Ever game and somehow it's 12,000 words of not Never Have I Ever. So all that drama is now moved to Chapter 11, and this one is the shippy mess that it is. Second, I was pretty much done with this two days ago and then MS Word literally turned like 4000 words into asterisks. Out of nowhere, just blink, boom, bye English, everything on the page is just asterisks. If you think that's funny, tbh, it kind of was because WHAT THE FUCK. But it also sucked, and meant I had to rewrite something I'D JUST spent like five hours hammering out. So that blew. But in any case, I hope you enjoyed this trip into pure ship-ville, and expect the brotps to make more of an appearance in the upcoming chapters. To those of you who've been feeling a little like Bamon hasn't had enough going on, I hope this chapter changed your mind a little :) Drop me a line if you can - I adore hearing from you guys more than you know. Gabi out._


	11. Tick, Tick

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Eleven: Tick, Tick_

* * *

"What if we jumped from the _third_ floor?"

"No."

"The snow would totally break our fall!"

"And our necks," Caroline chirped sarcastically, gaze flat and chin slumped against her hand as Bonnie braided her hair. Or at least, that's what she assumed was happening—Bonnie'd already managed to burn off a few strands of it, so who really knew what was up next?

The past few hours had gone by relatively incident-free, largely thanks to Stefan: he'd managed to dig up some ancient copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon and Bonnie spent the next two hours making rides that flew off the rails with screaming passengers trapped on them. It was a fitting metaphor, in Caroline's opinion.

Unfortunately, Bonnie's fascination with virtual mass murder had petered off about twenty minutes ago, and now they were back to square one: sprawled out in the living room, senses honed, waiting for disaster to strike. " _Ow_ ," she hissed as Bonnie yanked particularly hard on a lock of hair, causing her to snort unapologetically.

"Not my fault your limp ass hair won't hold anything."

Damon lifted his head from the couch he was draped over like some dramatically slain Shakespearean prince. "Are we discussing hair-pulling?"

"Yep," Bonnie said, twisting Caroline's hair in a sharp move that elicited another wince.

"Underappreciated art form," he offered, and Caroline glowered.

"Disagree."

Damon snorted. "Since _when_?"

"Since always."

"What about when _I_ would—"

"Meh."

His expression grew thoughtful. "Really?"

"Yeah, I didn't care either way."

"Huh."

"I mean, it wasn't horrible or anything, just—

"—meh?"

"Exactly."

"Interesting."

"But that's probably just a me-thing—I wouldn't drop it from your repertoire or anything."

"Let's ask the audience," he said, pivoting his sharp blue stare up to Bonnie. Caroline noted the flicker of interest it took on. "Judgy, thoughts on sexual hair-pulling?"

"Don't fuck with my hair, bro."

"Well, that settles that."

"I'd pull yours, though."

His stare lit with a glitter of surprise, and Caroline felt a prickle of amusement at Bonnie's telltale drunken bluntness. "Is that right?"

"Yep." Caroline winced again as Bonnie tugged her hair again for emphasis.

"Now by 'yours', do you mean a general you," he pressed, propping himself up on his elbows, "or me specifically?"

"General," she said thoughtlessly. "You're not special, buddy. _Although_ …" she paused after a second, her fingers loosening in Caroline's hair, and for a moment, Caroline had no idea what she was doing. Then without warning, Bonnie hopped up to her feet and sidled over to the side of the couch.

Damon lazily tilted his head back to meet her gaze as she loomed over him, and Caroline noted it was probably the only time anyone over twelve had ever had to look up to see Bonnie. "Your hair does seem _particularly_ pull-able," she observed, slipping her fingers into the lush wave of black, and the corners of his lips curled upward.

"I deep conditio—

A sudden yank had his head snapped back, neck a pronounced arc of skin and Adam's apple. Caroline's brows ticked upward as Bonnie's gaze lit with satisfaction. "Oh, yeah," she drawled, fingers locked in his hair in an uncompromising fist. "I'd have fun with this." She slid her fingers free and eased around, ambling over to the kitchen with a casual, "Too bad I'd never sleep with you."

Damon's stare followed her swaying frame with a narrowed look till she disappeared through the doorway. "You know, your roomie's kind of a cocktease."

Caroline snorted. "You're not a hard cock to tease."

"Rude," he sighed as he resettled against the cushions.

"Try honest."

"I happen to have sky-high standards, Goldilocks."

"You met me by a urinal while I was holding my co-worker's hair up so he wouldn't puke on it."

He lifted a there-ya-go hand. "Clear sign of a nice person."

"And then you told me to ditch him and get a drink with you."

"I was obviously just testing you."

"And I went with you."

"Passed with flying colors—nice people are nauseating."

"Right?"

"The _worst_."

"Half the time they're not even good people, they're just nice."

"Oh, they get away with so much shit," he agreed. "Like 'have a nice day'? Bitch, don't tell me what to do."

"I'll have a shitty day if I want to."

"Exactly."

She snorted, lifting a hand up to try and smooth down whatever atrocity Bonnie had done to her hair. "And what about the 'do you have a minute for the environment' people?"

"Oh, I sued them," he said offhandedly and she let out a surprised laugh.

"What? How?"

"They're always outside my building being all 'ease your corporate guilt by funding our shady never-heard-of-it charity for seashells', and they made me late to a meeting, so I got my client to sue them."

Her eyes were bright with delight. "Did you win?"

"Nah, but they don't fuck with me anymore, so I'm calling that a W."

"Nice."

"Thank you."

"Newbury has all the PETA people," she drawled, and Damon let out a deep groan.

" _Vegans_."

"Do you know how many times I've been straight up _assaulted_ for wearing faux fur?" she scoffed. "Like they don't even ask if it's real, they just swoop in like self-righteous vultures and go 'how's that dead animal feel on your shoulders?' and I'm just like 'sorry can't talk still chewing my giant steak from lunch'."

Damon snorted. "They once tried to get me to support turkeys like those assholes aren't the meanest little shits on the planet."

Her eyes lit with amusement. "Are they really that bad?"

"Bruh," he said, eyes bright as he veered his head back to meet her gaze from upside down, "I lived on a farm for a little bit and there was this one-eyed turkey named Lester: _stone cold motherfucker_. Straight up chased me into a trashcan and stood stock-still for an hour waiting for me to come out."

"Yeah, sure," Caroline said dismissively, and his eyes widened.

"Dead serious, like he didn't even blink his one stupid eye the whole time."

"What'd you do?"

"I think I got like heatstroke or something 'cause I just snapped," he said with a chuckle. "Like I legit exploded out of the trashcan waving the lid around like a psycho and started chasing him back all 'TIME TO MEET THE FOOD CHAIN, LESTER'."

Her shoulders shook as she began to laugh. "How _old_ were you?"

"Ten-ish?"

"Oh my _God_."

"I chased him for a solid twenty minutes, man, I was _pissed_ —I was like grabbing sticks and shit and all the chickens he'd fucked with started running behind me in solidarity, it was wild."

"Shut up."

"I'm not kidding, I had a friggin' livestock army, it was like Animal Farm."

"I don't even kind of believe you."

He reached up and pulled the collar of his shirt down, revealing a light scar on the top of his shoulder. "Battle wound."

"Bullshit."

"I swear to God."

"How did the turkey even get that high?"

"I was ten!"

"And why were you living on a farm?"

He shrugged, mirthful stare swinging back to the ceiling. "Moved around a lot." It was a vague answer, and she noted the evasiveness and rolled with it. It was part of why they got on so well, she suspected—they both liked to keep things fun and frothy and naturally navigated away from anything heavier.

"Well, be happy you didn't tell me this story at the bar because it would've been a deal-breaker."

He scoffed. "What are you talking about, I led a _revolution_."

"You hid in a trashcan from a turkey."

"I was like the Che Guevara of the Illinois agricultural scene—the roosters worshipped me."

"I can't believe I took you home with me."

His expression grew considering. "I can—I'm really pretty."

She scoffed, lounging back against the armchair with a luxuriating air. "I'm prettier."

" _Eh_."

"Seriously?"

"Don't feel bad, I've got the whole dark hair light eyes combo goin'—it's dynamite."

" _Uh_ , tell that to Marilyn Monroe."

He heaved an exaggerated sigh. "I _guess_ you have the leggy blonde thing going for you—"

" _Thank_ you."

"—which, were I someone like _Stefan_ …" Her playfully combative expression sobered, not expecting the pivot. "I'd be super into."

She paused for a second, thrown. How was she supposed to respond to that? The control freak side of her was clear: frown, 'what are you talking about', aloof shrug, move on. But the other part of her, the more instinctive, buried one, seized on the fact that… maybe someone else had seen them. The looks. The way Stefan's stare seemed to be snagging on her lately, unintentionally, just for a second, before zipping to wherever it meant to go.

She hadn't been sure if she was imagining it or not, since it was _Stefan_ and he was _deeeefinitely_ into the whole earthy thing (she'd seen a picture of Elena and the girl was basically a hot flower child: olive skin, doe eyes, long, dark hippie hair, eyelashes for days…), and while Caroline was hardly insecure about her looks, she'd always been distantly aware of the fact that they had no effect on Stefan.

It'd just never really bothered her before.

Not that it did now. Why would it? Hell, it was better that way: he'd almost kissed her again a few hours ago—imagine if she actually _was_ his type? Disaster. But still… she couldn't have been imagining it, could she? There was… lingering. Or was there? She gave her head a sudden shake to clear it—what the hell did it matter?

"Pretty sure Stefan's into girls who look like they live in a commune," she finally responded, shooting her nails a breezy look that attempted to disguise the agitation prickling her skin, and she could practically hear Damon's smirk.

"If you say so."

The sing-song voice simultaneously annoyed and intrigued her. What was making him so smug? Did he know something she didn't? Had Stefan said something? Had Damon seen them that second night? Her tongue itched to press the issue, but she knew should leave it alone: pressing would make it look like she cared about it.

Which obviously she didn't.

No caring here, buck-o.

Pure non-caring.

Good ol' fashioned indiffer—

"He's a leg man."

Her gaze snapped up to Damon's—he was tossing up an apple he'd swiped from the fruit bowl and catching it aimlessly. "What?"

"Steffy-bear. He told me when we were drigh bonding. Total leg guy." At Caroline's loaded silence, he angled a flat gaze over to hers. "You were obviously wondering why I thought he'd be into you so in the interest of saving ti—"

"I wasn't wondering anything," she clarified, voice a little too sharp, and his brows ticked upward.

"Someone's defensive."

She gave a stiff shrug. "Why would I be defensive?"

"I dunno, you tell me."

"Nothing to tell."

His eyes lit with curiosity. "Are you into Stefan?"

" _What_?" she laughed, skin flaring with heat.

"Like _into him_ into him?" he pressed, blithely unconcerned with her discomfort as he resumed his one-man game of catch. "I mean, obviously you guys are hooking up bu—"

A throw pillow hit him over the head before he could continue, knocking the apple to the floor. " _Keep your friggin' voice down_!" she hissed, shooting a panicked glance over to the kitchen, and Damon swatted the pillow down with a harassed look.

"Didn't realize it was supposed to a secret."

"It's not—it just—" she waved a frustrated hand around, "it isn't enough of a thing to be a secret, but Bonnie doesn't know and if she did she'd make a big deal out of it and seriously, it's the biggest non-deal ever. In fact, it's already over. One-time thing."

Well, technically two-time… almost three-ti—she shook her head irritably to clear it.

"Sounds like a secret to me," Damon replied, and Caroline's eyes slitted.

"It's a convenience omission."

"Totes a secret."

"And back-up: how did you even know?" she demanded, face crumpling in confusion, and he scoffed, shooting her a 'really' look.

"I literally walked in on you guys tangled up in the bathtub this morning."

Her expression loosened. Oh. Well, yeah. Though technically that wasn't—

"Plus, it's just super obvious," he continued, slipping into a chuckle, "which is why it's hilarious that you've been trying to keep it a secret."

"I already told you, it's not a secret, it's—" Her eyes suddenly thinned, struck by the rest of his words. "What do you mean, 'super obvious'?"

"Please." He rolled his eyes, folding his arms behind his head and swinging his lazy gaze back to the ceiling.

"Please _what_?"

His smile grew infuriatingly pleasant. "Why do you care?" Another rabid pillow came flying at his face and he smacked it out of the way with an outraged look. "Hey, pillow assassin, you want to take a friggin' Xanax?"

" _Please what_?"

"You two have been a second away from hate sex since day 1 of this avalanche, that's what," he snapped, snippy gaze still fixed on the assaulting pillow. "All that tension and bitchi—woman, that pillow has _sequins_ on it, do you even know how painful sequins are?"

"It didn't even start the first day!"

"A girl once hit me in the face with her sequin purse and I ended up in the emergency room."

"I don't even know when it started—"

"I had sequins embedded into my goddamn skin."

"—but it definitely wasn't day one!'

"Fuck sequins, honestly. Fuck turkeys _and_ sequins, like what did we do as a species to deserve—"

" _Damon_!"

" _What_?"

"Focus!"

"On _what_?"

"The Stefan thing!'

He shot her a bewildered look. "I thought it wasn't a thing."

"It's—" she exhaled tightly, pushing a hand through her hair. "It's not, I just." Her lips pressed together in a tight line, and he arched a brow for a moment before lapsing into a chuckle, grabbing the apple off the floor and lounging back against the sofa.

"You've gotta sort out your life, 'Locks."

She rolled her eyes as he resumed his toss-and-catch routine, slumping her chin against her hand with a sigh.

Easier said than done.

* * *

Cooking with Bonnie wasn't a fun time for Stefan even on the best of days. She was impatient with recipes. She'd start eating things straight out of the pot before they were done. She thought 'a cup' of something meant grabbing a literal cup of any size and filling it up. She couldn't fathom a world where ketchup didn't make something better. Blah, blah, bitch, bitch, insert grievance here.

But then there was cooking with _drunk_ Bonnie.

And the blaring, impromptu drum solos on pots and pans. And the way she'd turn the gas all the way up on the stove to make the fire massive. And the single-mindedness with which she'd try to throw in random ingredients when he wasn't looking.

"Would you just—" he grabbed her wrist with a sharp sigh as she made to pour an entire liter of chocolate syrup over the chicken he was cooking and she groaned in response.

"You have _no vision_."

"Yeah, well, unfortunately I have taste buds, so," he plucked the bottle from her hand and set it on one of the higher shelves, causing her to glower, "no syrup."

"Boring."

"Yep."

"Lame and boring."

"Thaaaat's me."

"Shark Week sucks."

" _Wow_ ," he said, setting the spatula down and whirling around to hit her with a deadpan look. "Low-blow."

"Highlights was better than National Geographic."

His mouth fell open in mock-appall. "Take it back."

"The Discovery Channel sold out to Disney."

He whipped the spatula up like a weapon, stance threatening. " _Take it back_."

"Never _,_ " she said, eyes bright with villainy delight, and he couldn't help but snort at how kid-like she always got when she was drunk: it was like messing with a toddler. Except, you know, toddlers didn't bolster their statements by suddenly holding up giant ass kitchen knives. Fortunately, his cell started buzzing against the counter before she could get too stabby and she abandoned the knife with a clatter, opting instead for the phone.

" _Hellllloooo,_ Stefan's Prostitution Palace, this is Helga speaking."

" _Bon_ ," he groaned—his boss called him on there sometimes—but she merely held a hand up, dancing a few steps back when he reached up to try to swipe it from her.

"Ah, yes, I see," she said after a few moments, having begun maneuvering around the kitchen as he set off after her. "Well, the competition is really stiff, unfortunately, so you're going to have to really bring your A-game. How do you feel about nipple tassels—"

He snatched the phone out of her hand with a wince and brought it to his ear, dread pooling in his stomach. "Hello?"

"Why you gotta interrupt me in the middle of my dream job interview?"

His body loosened at the familiar voice, relief coasting through his shoulders. Oh, good. So he still had an internship. "You know how I get," he said after a beat, lips quirking as he scrubbed a hand over his face. "Middle child syndrome, can't stand seeing my siblings be successful."

"I knew mom should've stopped at me," Lexi said in her typical drawl, all irreverence and ease—he could just see her sprawled over one of the fancy sofas their mom was constantly telling them to stay off of. "No you, no Beks—just the angel children."

He eased back against the counter with a dry look, keeping the corner of his gaze on Bonnie. "In what universe were you an angel child?"

"Oh, right, that was just Freya."

"She back from Taiwan yet?"

"Yeah, kid, everyone's home. We're just waiting on the prodigal son, _as usual_."

"I'm easily the most punctual person in our entire family."

"Yeeeeah, but you've been so busy saving the planet that you don't make time for the little people anymore."

He rolled his eyes at the comment, though a small, distant part of him knew she wasn't totally wrong. He had been a little isolated lately. "Givin' Bekah a run for her money with the melodrama, there."

" _Dude_ , did I tell you what she did at dinner the other day?"

His mouth lit with an instinctive smile. "No."

"I swear to God, Stef, she's gotten worse," she said with a laugh. "That sorority's she's in has gotta go—and you know I'm not one to deny myself potential access to a house full of hot girls."

He snorted. "No, you're not."

"So believe me when I say that it's bad."

"What happened?"

"Okay, so you remember that gluten allergy she randomly decided she had last year?"

He frowned as he watched Bonnie begin to inspect a cupboard a little too intensely for his liking. "I thought it was a spontaneous lactose intolerance."

"It was both."

He snorted—Rebekah was something else. "'Course it was."

"So we're all at this Thai place that just opened on River Street—by the way, Dad's super obsessed with Thai food now—and as the waiter's telling us the specials, Rebekah straight up asks hi—"

"Are you talking about me?" he heard a muffled voice interject in the background, affronted even from thousands of miles away, and his mouth instinctively curled at the sound.

"No, Beks, believe it or not, not everything is about you."

"You said my name."

"Hey, Stefan, did you know there's more than one person named Rebekah in the world?"

"Don't be an asshole," he chuckled, and before she could respond, he heard the scuffle of the phone being ripped away from her hand.

"Stefan?"

Rebekah, the wildly theatrical baby of the Salvatore gaggle and incidentally his only younger sibling, brought an instinctive flare of fondness to his grin. "Hey, Smalls."

"Can you _please_ come home and rescue me from her? She's being vile and it's ruining Christmas."

"Do you like her new accent?" Lexi chimed in from the background, laughter brightening her voice, and Rebekah inhaled sharply.

"I do _not_ have a new accent!"

"Bitch lives in Georgia her whole life and spends _one week_ in London and suddenly says shit like 'vile'."

 _"Stefan_!"

"Lexi, back off," he replied, amused gaze veering ceiling-ward at the perpetual friction between the two of them, though it once again snagged on Bonnie, who was _still_ staring down the cupboard with a furrowed expression. The hell was she looking for, Narnia?

"When are you coming home?" Rebekah pressed, ignoring the stereotypical British words Lexi had started spewing in the background like the toddler she was.

"Depends on the weather, honestly, but hopefully by early next week," he said, and she groaned.

"That's an eternity!"

His lips twitched. "You'll live."

"Ugh, that means I have to reschedule with the photographer."

This time it was his turn to groan. "Bekah, please tell me you aren't—"

"—arranging to have a professional photo taken for the family Christmas card because we aren't a bunch of heathens who send out generic, store-bought stationary? _Yeah_. I am."

"Heathens!" Lexi sang out in a pompous British accent, and Rebekah must've hurled something at her 'cause she squawked in protest.

There was a series of whooshes and thwacks, a muffled shriek, the sound of what he was pretty sure was the phone being dropped, and then, like the voice of God parting through the chaos, a cool, pointblank, "Seriously?"

Thank God for Freya.

"She started it," Lexi drawled.

"You're 27 years old."

"I'm aware."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, Freyabot, I'm sure."

"Get your feet down, you slob, those are mom's favorite couches." There was a ruffle of motion on the other end of the line and then, "Stefan?"

"Heya, big sis."

"How's it going up there?" Freya asked, as clipped and to-the-point as always. "I've been checking the weather channel—looks like you've got a few days left before it's safe."

"Eh, a little crowded but I can't complain."

"You're okay with food and everything?" she pressed, ever the eldest, and he could just imagine her intense expression as she mentally catalogued her checklist of concerns. "How's Bonnie?"

"She goes by Helga now," Lexi added helpfully, and Freya ignored her.

"Have you been feeding her?"

He shot a wry glance at the ticking time bomb on the other side of the kitchen. "She's… good. Very well-fed and, uh… hydrated."

"Okay, 'cause you know she'll survive off pop tarts if you let her—girl doesn't know when to stop."

His lips lifted dryly. "Definitely got some restraint issues."

"And everyone else is okay? You said there were four of you, right?"

" _Ooo,_ right, how's the bitchy roommate?" Lexi tossed in from the background, and he tensed slightly: he forgot that he'd mentioned not getting along well with Caroline a while back. He realized it suddenly felt weird to think of her that way, as just 'Bonnie's bitchy roommate'. It felt… limiting. Incomplete. Left so many parts of her out.

"She's fine," he ventured, keeping his tone casual. "It's been fine."

"Does she still hate you for no reason?"

A strange wash of snapshots hit him at the same time: her head on his shoulder in the quiet morning light, her freckles furrowing as she tried to will herself to make breakfast, her legs wrapping around his waist as he hoisted her up against the bathroom door, her tentative laugh flickering against the walls of the pitch-black basement…

No.

No, he was pretty sure she didn't still hate him.

He was also pretty sure she'd had a reason to when she did.

Time was a _weird_ development.

"I—" A sudden commotion on the other end of the line saved him from having to answer, and his brow furrowed at the mixture of shouting and decidedly Rebekah-like squealing.

"Mom and Dad just got home with the tree," Freya explained, tone mildly exasperated, and he arched a brow.

"Based on Rebekah's response, I'm assuming it's massive?"

"You know it's not Christmas if we don't bring home the most obnoxious one."

"We're the worst."

"Is that Stefan?" he heard his mom's worried voice ring out from the background, to which a similarly muffled Lexi replied, "He's calling from his Prostitution Palace."

"Give me the—" another scuffle, some scratchy noise, a predictable beep, and then, "Stefan?"

"Hi, mom," he said with a grin—she accidentally put him on speaker every time she talked to him.

"Stefan, when on earth are you coming home?" She had her stressed voice on in typical Salvatore holiday fashion, and he felt a slight pang of homesickness at the warm familiarity of it.

"Somewhere around Monday, if all goes well."

"You can't make it any sooner?"

"I mean, I could try walking but I'm not sure that'd do much."

"Joe, for Christ's sake, you're getting pine needles everywhere."

"It's a Christmas tree, darling, that's what it does." His smile widened at his dad's even-tempered voice in the background.

"Well, maybe if you didn't insist on grabbing the biggest one they had—"

"Blame your daughter."

"No, I'm blaming you."

He heard his dad sigh as his mother brought the phone back up to her mouth. "Your dad and his ridiculous Rebekah indulgences."

Stefan shrugged. "She's the baby."

"Well, maybe that baby can help clean up the mess her 'perfect tree' makes instead of hanging two ornaments and then disappearing."

"I do _not_ disappear after hanging two ornaments!" Rebekah huffed from the background, and Lexi snorted.

"Yeah, you disappear after one."

"Hey, Stef," his dad's strained voice called in the background, likely in the middle of dragging the tree to the dining room, "when ya heading down, son? Might've noticed there's a bit of an estrogen imbalance."

"Oh, please, Stefan's more hormonal than I am," Lexi scoffed, and Stefan shrugged.

"That's true."

"Well, get here soon, anyway—we miss you, bud."

"Seconded!"

"Thirded!"

"You're aight," Lexi drawled, and his mom heaved an exasperated sigh.

"What she means is stay safe, sweetheart."

"I will."

"And send Bonnie our love."

"Will do."

"Is she absolutely sure she doesn't want to join us for Christmas this year?"

"Yeah, she's going to Maine to see her Grams."

"Alright, well let her know the invitation is always open and we miss her to pieces."

"I want my waltz partner back," his dad threw in from the background, and Stefan's lips quirked.

"I'll let her know."

"Alright, love you, bug."

"Love you, too, mom."

"Merry Christmas." She let out a sudden gasp, "Joe, _watch the chandelie—"_

A crash and then the line went dead. Stefan glanced at his phone for a second before chuckling, a faint layer of nostalgia buzzing through his veins. He missed his family. It'd been ages since they'd all gotten together, and he knew a large part of that was his fault—he'd skipped out on Thanksgiving and hadn't been coming home as much over the past few summers. He'd just… needed some space to think, and a house full of nosy, opinionated extroverts wasn't the ideal place to get that.

Bonnie called it his 'post-breakup loner phase'.

Whatever it was, he knew it'd kept him away a little too long.

"The fam sends their love," he said in Bonnie's general direction, scrolling through a slew of missed text messages—four of them were in all caps and from Rebekah. "Dad says you owe him a waltz." At the lack of response, he glanced up, and his gaze promptly sobered at the sight of the empty kitchen. "Bon?" he called out, abandoning his phone with a clatter and switching off the stove before surging toward the living room. He'd looked away for a _second_ , where the hell could she have—

"Heya, Stef!"

He drew to a halt in the doorway upon spotting her in the middle of the living room, though his flash of relief almost immediately morphed into dread: she was holding up three massive bottles of champagne. His sharp gaze shot over to Caroline. "I thought you said you were out of alcohol!"

She ruffled at the accusation in his voice. "We were!" He blinked at her in bewilderment and she balked. "Mostly?"

" _Caroline._ "

"I forgot about our leftover New Year's stash, alright?" she snapped, crossing her arms with a scowl. "I hate champagne, I forget it exists."

His head dropped back into a groan—just when he'd thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Alright _,_ new plan: they needed to wrestle the bottles away from Bonnie and pour them down the sink before she cou—

 _Pop_!

A rabid cork came flying at his head and he just barely managed to dodge it, sparing what likely would've been his left eye. "Seriously?" he snapped, harassed stare flying over to his gleeful assailant, but Bonnie was too focused on the rush of froth bubbling out of the bottle to care.

" _Awwwww_ , yeah _,"_ she drawled, shoulders starting to bop up and down in an improvised rhythm. "Time for some bubbly wubbly. High rollers up in 2B. _Suck on that,_ student loans!"

"Should we be, I don't know," Damon waved a casual hand around from where he was sprawled on the couch, "stopping her?"

"Club goin' upppp," Bonnie sang, "on a Tuuuuesday."

Damon's brow furrowed. "It's Wednesday."

"Got your girl in the cut and she choosay."

"And we're in an apartment."

"Bon—"

"Take _one_ more fucking step and I will down this bottle in a single gulp," she snapped as Stefan made to approach her, demeanor shifting from loose to razor-sharp in the span of a heartbeat, and he halted mid-step, lips pressing together.

Caroline sighed. "C'mon, Bonnie, can't you just—

"Here's how this is gonna go," Bonnie announced, slicing through the plea with a no-nonsense tone and waving around the bottles in her hands. "I'm drunk, you guys aren't, and that's lame affffff, so y'all are going to drink this champagne."

Caroline's brows shot up. "Us?"

"Yep."

"All of it?"

"Correct."

Stefan snorted. "Yeah, that's not happening."

"No?" Bonnie prompted, lifting the open bottle up to her lips. "Then I guess I'm downing this one by myse—"

"Hold on," Caroline jumped in, straightening a bit and shooting a pointed glance at Stefan. "We're in."

His brow furrowed—was she crazy? "No, we're not." Her gaze flashed in a 'trust me' manner and he merely blinked at her, thrown, as she hopped to her feet.

"Ah, ah, _ah,_ " Bonnie tutted, taking a wide step back, "you're not getting close enough to take my leverage, bro—catch." She hurled one of the corked bottles at her and Caroline caught it with a horrified squawk.

"Jesus, Bonnie!"

"Damon," she continued, unperturbed, tossing the second bottle at the couch, and he caught it with the ease of someone used to having alcohol unceremoniously hurled at his face. "Make any attempt to break them, throw them away, or pour the champagne out and I can't even _tell_ you how fast I'll chug this."

"Do it," Damon yawned, eliciting looks of alarm from Stefan and Caroline, and he shrugged against the couch. "What's the worst that can happen—she'll probably just knock out."

Caroline groaned. "Drunk Bonnie doesn't knock out, she knocks _people_ out, like why are you so slow about this?"

"Then grab the damn bottle from her."

"You want to try?"

"Not really."

Bonnie watched them bicker with an amused, glittery stare, lightly tapping the bottleneck against her lips, and Stefan took advantage of the moment to mull over the best way out of this: if he made her mad, she'd find some crazy way to lash out, alcohol or no alcohol, and the last thing any of them needed was Drunk Bonnie on a revenge kick.

Before he could settle on anything, though, Caroline walked over to him, expression tired and hand threaded through her hair. "Look," she began in a low voice, drawing to a halt about a foot away, "if we can keep Bonnie from drinking anything else, she'll start sobering up soon, so why don't we just drink a little until she calms down and then call it a night?"

"Because there's no guarantee she's anywhere close to calming down," he replied, gaze flickering over her shoulder to an impishly smirking Bonnie before flitting back to Caroline. Her blue eyes were bright with fatigue, dark circles gathering beneath them, and he suddenly remembered the night she'd had. The breakdown, the bathtub, the rocky morning—it felt so long ago, but it wasn't. She'd barely slept. His expression softened a bit, and after a second, he cleared his throat. "You know what, I can handle this."

Her face crumpled. "What? No."

"Yeah, I've done it plenty of times, and you barely got any sleep—"

"Neither of us did, it's fine."

"Nah, I'm used to not sleeping, it's—"

" _Stefan_ ," she said, cutting through his words with an exasperated look, "I'm not going anywhere, so if you want to be a hero, shut up, drink some friggin' champagne, and trust me." She held the bottle up to him with a vaguely pleading look, and every single lawyer-y part of him screamed that this was a bad idea.

There was no telling how much longer Bonnie's buzz would last.

There was no guarantee she wasn't going to down the bottle in her hand anyway.

Damon and Caroline were both hungover from the night before and would probably get drunk off much less alcohol than normal.

And yet, for some reason, he found himself grabbing the bottle, uncorking it, and bringing it up to his mouth, stare lingering on Caroline's for a beat before taking a deep swig. Her face almost instantly relaxed, tension easing from the tight lines, and okay, maybe he did know why he did it.

"Victory!" Bonnie roared, pumping a dramatic fist in the air. "One down, two to go."

Caroline grabbed the bottle from Stefan and shot a glance over her shoulder at Damon, who was staring back at her with a dark expression.

"Are we seriously doing this?"

She responded by taking a quick swig, and her face immediately screwed up in disgust. " _Wow_ , that's bad."

"Really selling me on it."

Stefan sighed. "Just drink the damn champagne, Damon."

Damon arched a brow at the command, stare flickering over to his. " _Bossy_ pants over here. Goldilocks is starting to rub off on you." His expression grew sly. "Though I hear that's not the only kind of rubbing happeni—"

" _DRINK,_ " Caroline snapped, shoulders tight and hands gathering into fists at her sides, and Stefan shot him a riotous glare before hazarding a quick glance at Bonnie. Thankfully, her gaze was fixed on the bottle in Damon's hand, entirely uninterested in the words being thrown around.

"Fiiiine," Damon conceded, making a big, dramatic show out of getting to his feet, and he met Stefan's glower with a breezy wink as he passed him. Stefan's jaw ticked in annoyance. He snuck a curious glance at Caroline—she was pointedly avoiding his stare. Great.

"So," Damon drawled as he circled around the couch and sidled over to Bonnie, halting about three feet away and giving her a lingering onceover, "we drink, you chill the fuck out, is that the deal?"

Bonnie shrugged, dragging her bottle against her lips. "Something like that."

Damon watched her for a second, stare assessing and a little hooded, and Stefan suddenly detected a weird energy between the two of them. It was different from the one at the kitchen table—similarly combative, but less defensive, somehow. More… his stare squinted a bit, and then it hit him. Sexual. _Way_ more sexual. He pressed his lips into a thin line, blinking rapidly—well, _that_ was an observation he could've done without.

"I'd just like to go on record saying this is a shit plan," Damon said pleasantly, stare unmoving from Bonnie's as he coaxed the cork from his bottleneck. It shot off with a light _pop_ and he swung the fizzing bottle up in toast, panning it around the room. "Nothing like cheap, room temperature champagne to chase away a hangover, am I right?" And with that, he tossed his head back and guzzled a solid fifth of the contents in one swig.

Stefan released a slow, measured breath, attempting to ignore the dread slugging like lead through his veins.

This was fine.

He could totally handle this.

Keeping a cool head amidst chaos was his thing. He'd survived Rebekah accidentally dying her hair pink on prom night, Lexi dragging him to Vegas for his 21st birthday, and the two months where Freya'd morphed into an all-out psycho while studying for the bar—he could handle three drunk people.

Totally handle it.

All he had to do was stay sober.

* * *

"—SHE DRESSES ALL CRAZY AND THEATRICAL—"

"ELTON JOHN!"

"FEMALE, STEFAN!"

"FREDDIE MERCURY!"

" _FEMALE_!"

"CHER!"

"FROM THIS DECADE."

"KIM KARDASHIAN!"

"I SAID A SINGER!"

"KENDRA KARDASHIAN!"

"WHO!?"

Stefan just-stay-sober Salvatore, despite a fierce, admirable, but ultimately laughable effort, was drunk off his ass _._ And, incidentally, the worst partner in the history of the Heads Up 'Superstars' category. "Isn't that the other Kardashian!?"

"There's like six of them and none are Kendra!" Bonnie cried, and his bleary gaze widened beneath the phone he was holding against his forehead.

" _Six_?"

"We have five seconds left!"

"What do they all do!?"

"OH MY GOD, FOCUS: POKER FACE. BAD ROMANCE."

"Are they all okay!?"

 _"Why wouldn't they be okay_?"

"I don't—"

The buzzer blared before she could answer, signaling their time was up, and she threw her head back with a theatrical groan as Caroline gave Damon a cheery high-five. Stefan brought the phone down to squint at the screen. "Ohhhh, Lady Gaga," he said, lapsing into a chuckle. "She does dress weird."

"I'm going to murder you," Bonnie gritted out.

"You should've just said the one that puts that little girl in all her videos."

"THAT'S SIA."

His face crumpled. "Who?"

" _Soooo_ ," Damon interjected in a shit-eating voice before Bonnie could deck him, plucking the phone out of Stefan's hand, "just to be clear, that's a grand total of _zero_ points for Team Brainy Besties in round five—"

"And round four," Caroline tossed in helpfully, to which Bonnie reached a blind hand out and flipped her off. The alcohol had cranked her competitive streak up a few thousand boozy degrees, which wasn't ideal given Damon and Caroline's absurd, borderline supernatural ability to guess what the other was talking about through no discernible logic.

Speaking of which. "You ready for this, Locks?" Damon asked, setting the timer before holding the phone up to his forehead, and Caroline gave a battle-ready whip of her hair.

"Bring it." The first word popped on the screen and she sat up ramrod straight, squaring her shoulders. "Ugliest thing you can think of."

"Windbreakers."

"Everybody hates—"

"—babies."

"Don't drink and—"

"—assemble Ikea furniture."

"Never forget."

"Pluto."

"The customer is always—"

"—an entitled little bitch."

"And?"

"Named Ryan."

"What's another name for hell?"

"Idaho."

"Scariest thing ever?"

"When toilets unexpectedly autoflush on you."

"Most confusing thing about the United States?"

"North and South Dakota."

"Best argument for birth control?"

"Donald Trump."

"We need a law against—"

"Coffee shops that charge for wifi."

"Greatest American hero of our generation?"

"Nicki Minaj."

The timer elapsed and Caroline let out a victorious whoop, pumping a fist into the air. "SUCK IT, BITCHES. How many was that?"

Damon brought the phone down and glanced at the screen with a smug look. "Eleven."

"No way!" Bonnie snapped, hopping out of her chair and reaching across the coffee table to snatch the phone out of his hand. She stared at the list of words in fury.

 _Windbreaker_

 _Babies_

 _Ikea_

 _Pluto_

 _Ryan_

 _Automatic Toilet_

 _Idaho_

 _South Dakota_

 _Donald Trump_

 _Wifi_

 _Nicki Minaj_

"How the actual hell did you guess any of these correctly?"

"'Cause my hints are bomb dot com," Caroline sang, snapping her fingers and busting out into some kind of victory dance.

"Your hints make no sense!"

Damon scoffed. "They make perfect sense."

"The customer is always named _Ryan?"_ Bonnie echoed in disbelief, and he shrugged.

"My last three clients were named Ryan."

"So were mine!" Caroline chimed in, swinging her head from side to side in a carefree rhythm, and Damon caught a very drunk and very obvious Stefan watching her from the other end of the couch. Jesus, these two were supposed to be subtle?

"What about 'most confusing thing about the United States is North and South Dakota'?" Bonnie tried again, baffled, and Damon tossed a hand up.

"Who the fuck lives there?"

"And why are there two of them?" Caroline added. "Like of all the states to have two of, we have two Dakotas!? No."

"It ain't right."

"Nope."

Bonnie tossed the phone to the floor with a growl. "Whatever, I'm bored of this—let's play something else."

" _Yeeeees_ ," Stefan said, knocking his head back against the couch in relief, and Caroline's face lit up.

"Let's play Never Have I Ever!"

" _Nooooo_ ," Stefan groaned in an immediate backtrack, and Caroline snorted.

"What, afraid of ruining your saintly reputation?" He angled his gaze over to hers and she arched a brow. "Or maybe you're afraid of confirming it."

His gaze took on a hazy glint. "I think we both know I'm not a saint."

Damon rolled his eyes—Christ.

"I just think this game's really juvenile," Stefan explained with a shrug, and Caroline smirked.

"That's what people say when they're hiding something."

"And we _all know_ you two aren't hiding anything," Damon interjected like the shithead he was, waving a loose hand between them. "Not a single thing. Especially involving each other. That'd be absurd, right, Bon?" He glanced over to the girl in question, though to his disappointment, she wasn't paying attention again—in fact, she seemed distracted as hell, brow furrowed and stare fixed on the table between them. "Yo. Earth to drunken menace."

"Let's play something else," she said vaguely, as if he hadn't even spoken, and for a second he thought maybe she _had_ overheard them, it was that drastic of a shift in demeanor. This was the same girl who'd been doing the Single Ladies dance on the coffee table about five minutes ago.

"No way, it'll be fun!" Caroline replied, sitting up and folding her legs beneath her on the couch. "I'll go first—ready?"

"No."

"Never have I ever…" she pursed her lips in thought, ignoring Stefan's jab, "…killed someone."

Damon arched a brow and after a beat of silence, Stefan snorted. "Jesus, Caroline."

"What?" she said, shrugging. "I wanted to start off big!"

"What if one of us actually drank?"

"Then I'd have a shit ton of questions." Her eyes widened suddenly. "We should invite Kai over—you know that guy has stories!"

" _Yeah_ , he also has an elaborate ass collection of scalping knives, so I'm going to go ahead and veto dat ish," Stefan replied with a sassy snap, and Damon's lips twitched—drunk Stefan had a serious diva streak and it was entertaining as hell. It was always the quiet ones.

Speaking of quiet, Damon's eyes glided back over to the armchair Bonnie had pretzeled herself into. She was being weirdly moody. Maybe her buzz was finally wearing down. About time, honestly—he was sick of being the semi-sober dad.

"Damon, you're up," Caroline said, determined to have the game actually take off, and he eased his head against the chairback, stare flickering to the ceiling in thought.

"Hmmm, let's see, here… never have I ever… hooked up with anyone in this room." His gaze dropped back down to Caroline and Stefan, pleasant as can be, and the bubbly look immediately faded from her face. Damon milked their paralyzed hesitation for a few seconds before scrunching his nose. "Wait, yes I have, what am I talking about? Silly me. Re-do: never have I ever been convicted of a crime."

Caroline continued to glare at him, presumably writing the question off as another throwaway that wouldn't lead to any drinking, but to pretty much everyone's surprise, they heard a swig being taken.

Everyone turned to look at Stefan.

Bonnie, thus far entirely zoned out, gave a half-hearted snort at the move, but Stefan's face didn't flicker. She straightened up in her seat after a beat. "Wait, what?"

Stefan pressed his lips together in a resigned look and stared at his drink, and Damon let out a bright bark of laughter. "Seriously?"

" _Convicted_?" Caroline said, eyes bright with disbelief. "As in you're a _criminal_?"

"Okay, it's not that dramatic, it was just a misdemeano—"

The whack of a pillow cut him off as a wide-eyed, suddenly very engaged Bonnie stared straight at him, incensed. _"When the fuck were you arrested_!?"

He rubbed the side of his face with a wince. "A few years back in senior year."

Another whack. "For _what_?"

" _Jesus_ , Bonnie—"

"FOR WHAT?"

"Civil disobedience!"

Damon burst into another loud laugh, head knocking against the sofa. "Oh my God, you would. Please tell me you were protesting Styrofoam."

"Fracking, actually." Damon continued to laugh and Stefan's lips twitched, unable to help himself. _Whack_. " _Really_?"

"How the hell could you have not told me you got arrested!?"

"You were interviewing with med schools—I didn't want to distract you."

"That explains like three months! What about the rest of the past three years!?"

He gave a harassed shrug. "It never came up."

" _Never came—"_ she pressed her lips together in a tight line, lifting a hand and curling it into a fist to try and control her rage. "My best friend of twenty years went to prison and I didn't even know."

He rolled his eyes. "I didn't go to prison."

"My best friend of twenty years went to prison and I _didn't even freaking—_ MY BEST FRIEND OF TWENTY YEARS IS A FELON."

He scoffed out a disbelieving laugh. "It wasn't a felony—I literally got off with a community service."

"Which, let's face it, is probably his idea of a good time anyway," Damon added, and Stefan shot him a 'ha ha' look.

"I can't believe I didn't know this," Bonnie said in a scandalized aside, melodrama cranked up to an eleven. "You went through _all_ of that by yourself—"

"Hey, there was nothing you could've don—"

"—and I didn't even get to use it to boost my street cred? Seriously?" His face flattened. "I could've been queen of these streets, Stefan. Walk into the club, some dude won't leave me alone, 'HEY BUDDY, don't make me call my friend Stefan, he's an OUTLAW.'"

He snorted in exasperated amusement. "I'm not an outlaw."

"Ugh _,_ I can't even look at you right now."

"Bonnie—"

"No."

He couldn't help his laughter. "I'm sor—"

"You have the right to remain silent."

His harassed gaze swung over to Damon. "Thanks a lot."

Damon's face crumpled. "How was I supposed to know you were a closet convict?"

Stefan sighed, settling back against the couch with a resigned look, and Caroline leaned over to whisper something that made his lips quirk upward. Damon nodded his head across the table at Bonnie. "You're up, Witchy."

"No."

"No?"

"I'm emotionally compromised."

Damon clucked his tongue. "Stefan, you broke her."

"I didn't—"

"Oh, wait, I thought of one: never have I ever lied to my best friend for three whole years about being a _friggin' fugitive_."

Stefan raised a baffled hand. "Now I'm a fugi—"

"DRINK," Bonnie snapped, pointing a vicious finger at his solo cup, and Stefan sighed, raising it up in sarcastic toast.

"To being on the run from the law." He brought the cup to his lips and Bonnie watched him with frightening intensity, rolling her hand in a 'more' gesture until he'd downed a solid half of its contents. Satisfied, she glanced away and proceeded to ignore him.

"You're up, bud," Damon told Stefan, figuring the drunker everyone got, the sooner they'd pass out and he could go to fucking sleep, and Stefan let out a derisive scoff.

"Easy: never have I ever actually been on the run from the law."

Damon plucked up his cup and took a casual drink, garnering a surprised look from Stefan, though a suspiciously growing silence from the other two people in the room slowly redirected their focus. Caroline's lips were pressed into a tight, guilty line that looked like it was struggling not to crack into a grin, and Bonnie was chewing her lip vaguely, eyes averted.

Stefan's stare tapered. "Bon."

"Mm."

"You're lookin' a little conflicted, there."

"Mm."

"Almost like you're contemplating whether or not to drink."

She pursed her lips in thought, stare thinning. Then, "Are we talking like… _US_ law, or…?"

A bright cackle burst out of Caroline and she flung her hand up to try and stifle it. Stefan's stare switched between the two of them, and Caroline cleared her throat. "There's, uh—" a bubble of laughter cut her off, and she waved a hand, struggling to get ahold of herself, "there's a chance we might be… wanted… in Mexico…"

" _What_?" Stefan swung his gaze back to Bonnie, and her elusive face crumpled in defeat.

"It was her fault, okay?"

Caroline shook her head through another swell of laughter. "It wasn't all my fault!"

"What did you do!?"

"We—"

" _Caroline_ ," Bonnie growled, and the girl deflated slightly.

"—aren't allowed to talk about it."

"Also, _we_?" Bonnie scoffed, and Caroline's hand snapped up to point at her.

"You threw the piñata."

" _You threw the machete_!"

"I thought it was fake!"

"WHY WOULD A BUTCHER HAVE A FAKE MA—"

"And I friggin' _quote_ ," Stefan cut in, entirely ignoring their little blame game, "'Never have I ever lied to my best friend about being a fugitive'."

Bonnie's rage quelled as she considered the words. "Yeah, okay, but like…" she waved an impatient hand around, "I obviously meant, you know, in the continental US."

"Obviously."

"I did!"

"You're drinking twice."

"In fact, I'm pretty sure I said that."

" _Twice._ "

Bonnie heaved a dramatic sigh and took two big gulps of her champagne, and Damon's brows ticked up at the fact that everyone seemed to have completely forgotten that the original goal here was to keep her from drinking.

"Okay, my turn, my turn," Caroline said upon finishing her own sip, shifting eagerly in her seat—he didn't know what her deal was with champagne, but it made her bubbly as all hell. "Never have I ever… stolen a car."

Bonnie shifted irritably in her seat. "What's with the crime theme?"

Caroline scoffed. "Crime theme's fun!"

"It's boring."

"No, it's—" Caroline's eyes widened as they caught Damon's cavalier swig. " _You actually stole a car_?"

He waved a hand as he swallowed. "Stole is a strong word."

"Let me guess," Bonnie drawled with a look of complete disinterest, slumped against the chairback, "you prefer 'borrowed'?"

"Oh, no, I definitely stole it, it's just a strong word."

"See, now _that_ is a felony," Stefan said, pointing at Damon with a smug look, though after a beat, the nature of what'd just been said hit him and he blinked, turning to stare at Damon. "Dude, that's a _felony_."

"Right."

"A felony with a sixteen month minimum sentence in Massachusetts—more if you add a burglary count for breaking and entering."

"Relax, man, I gave it back." Stefan's alarmed expression eased the slightest bit until Damon shrugged. "I mean, assuming they found it."

"Stoooory, stooooory, stooooory," Caroline chanted, her eager gaze a sharp contrast to Stefan's, and Damon waved her off.

"Let's keep the ball rollin'."

"No _way,_ I want to hear what happened!"

Damon snorted. "And give Danny Do-Gooder over there a heart attack?"

Stefan lifted a harassed hand. "I—sorry, it's just—I feel an obligation as an advocate of the law to point out that—"

Caroline's bright scoff cut him off. "Friendly reminder that you've been _arrested_ , Judge Holier Than Thou."

"Right, 'cause I deserved to be," Stefan countered, stare switching over to hers. "That's exactly my point: breaking the law has conseque—" he frowned at the sudden look of intense concern on her face. "What?"

"Sorry, I'm just," she shook her head, brow furrowed anxiously, "worried you're going to choke on all that self-righteousness."

His face flattened as hers spread into a smirk. "There's a difference between righteousness and respect for a legal system that's developed over centu—"

"Jesus Christ, can I throw him out the window?"

Bonnie shrugged. "Snow's high enough—he wouldn't die."

"Mm, good point, I'll go up a few floors." Caroline shot him a breezy look and he rolled his eyes, though after a few seconds, she broke into a buoyant little laugh that had his lips twitching at the corners. "Damon," she sang, swiveling around and clapping her hands together, "you're up!"

"Right," he sighed, leaning back into his seat. "Never have I ever…" he gave a vague wave of the bottle slung between his fingers, searching for something to say. Truth be told, this game was kind of a headache for him. The scandalous, crazy reveals people were after were generally the things he _had_ done—it was the mundane stuff that he hadn't. What was he supposed to say, never had he ever played catch in a backyard? Never had he ever lived in the same place for more than a year? Never had he ever been camping?

"Doooo doooo dooo doooo," Caroline began humming, all angelic innocence, and he rolled his eyes at the Jeopardy theme song.

"Never have I ever robbed a house." Why not. It was mostly true. He'd stolen money from his foster parents before, but technically, it was the money the state gave them to feed him, which they weren't, so was it really stealing?

A tight sigh drew his gaze up, and it landed on Bonnie. Specifically, a fidgety, vaguely irritable Bonnie. His eyes narrowed against hers—what was her problem with this game, anyway? Her mood had taken a nosedive the second they started playing it, which was odd considering it seemed right her up drunk, shit-starting alley.

"Are we done? No one's going to drink?" she drawled, casting a flat gaze around the room. Overall, she looked bored, but there was an edge there, too. She almost looked a bit uncomfortable. "Great, then never have I ever been cheated on."

An unexpected flare of tension charged the easy mood of the room as everyone's gaze flickered over to Stefan. He was staring at Bonnie with a vague look, brows faintly raised, and Damon pressed his lips together in a 'welp' of a line.

This was awkward.

Luckily, after a few seconds, Stefan slipped into a small, tension-easing chuckle. "I mean, it's a liiiittle unclear who you're targeting here, but…" he reached forward and grabbed his cup with a wink, "better safe than sorry." He lifted it in toast before taking a swig, and the smile Bonnie gave him in return was cool and distant.

Caroline's face, on the other hand, loosened right back into its elfin grin. "Targeting the person right after you?" She clucked her tongue. "Bold move, Bon. Stefan, response?"

"Right," Stefan said, setting his cup down. "Time for some payback. Let's see: never have I ever…" his stare tapered for a few seconds before taking on a glitter, "screamed out the words 'spider-rat hybrid' in legitimate fear for my life." Caroline's mischievous stare melted in betrayal as Stefan lapsed into a dark laugh. "Plot twist."

"I was on your side!"

"Your cup's that way."

"I cannot _believe—_ "

"Bottom's up."

Her mouth snapped shut in indignation as she swiped her cup up and took a drink, and Damon snorted at the huffiness of it all. "Someone want to tell me what the fuck a spider rat hybrid is?"

"Sure, it's—"

" _Nothing_ ," Caroline snapped, shooting Stefan a withering glare, and he raised his hands in surrender. She shook her head in disbelief. "You come into _my_ house…"

"Next time call someone else to drive you home, then."

She lifted a hand to block his face. "Enough of you—my turn." She flipped her hair over her shoulder in a flash of gold and straightened up, setting her hands on her knees. "Never have I ever…" her gaze veered over to Bonnie, then Stefan, then sharpened wickedly, "…struck out with a 78-year old at a bar."

Damon choked on an unexpected laugh. " _Wow_ ," he managed as her savage gaze finally landed on his, legitimately impressed by the pivot. "Low blow, Locks."

"Only place I aim."

"What is this, the Never Have I Ever Judas round?" he asked, taking a harassed swig of his drink. "The hell did I ever do to you?"

Stefan's brow furrowed, eyes kindling with disbelief. "Wait, wait, wait," he said, lifting a hand in a processing gesture, "what?"

Caroline's eyes were twinkling with delight. "Exactly what it sounds like—Damon got rejected by a 78-year old cougar."

Stefan's brows flew upward, bright stare flying over to Damon. " _You_?"

Damon sighed. "Okay, first of all—"

A bright guffaw of laughter cut him off, and Damon rolled his eyes. "Oh man," Stefan said, scrubbing a hand over his face, "I need to hear this story."

"There's no story, that's just what happened," Caroline chirped, and Damon lifted a silencing hand.

"False—I was at the bar with the demon sitting next to you," he explained, nodding at Caroline, "and we playing drink or dare—"

"Classic family pastime," Stefan said with a nod.

"—and she dared me to see if I could pick up a woman who was legally blind—"

Caroline burst out laughing. "She was _not_ blind!"

"She was _totally_ blind."

"Oh my God, you're such a narcissist."

"She had a walking stick!"

"Yeah, to help her _walk_."

Damon waved her off with a sharkish grin. "You didn't see her up close."

"Yeah, but she definitely saw you up close," Caroline snorted, "and she was like 'neeeeext'."

"Yo, Justice League, where's your obligation to the law now?" he asked Stefan, lifting an outraged hand. "This is blatant slander."

"It ain't slander if it's true," Caroline said through pursed lips, taking an ain't shit slurp of her champagne, and Damon rolled his eyes.

"I'm retiring you as my ally. Steffy bear, what do you say? Allies?"

"Let's do it."

"My man." Damon lifted a ceremonious hand and Stefan gave him an amused high-five.

"Aww," Caroline drawled, cocking her head to the side, "the birth of a bromance."

" _Excuse_ you," Damon scoffed, "this bromance was born three days ago."

"True dat."

"Drigh brothers for _lyfe_. Fly like paper?"

"High like planes."

Damon flattened his hand and extended the thumb and pinky out into a finger-airplane as Stefan followed suit, and they glided their hands past each other's in some kind of handshake.

Caroline blinked at them. "Wow."

Damon shot Stefan a 'sorry about her' look. "She gets jealous."

"Of your little frat bro handshake?" She let out a bright scoff. "Please, me and Bonnie's runs yours into the ground—get up, Bon."

She wasn't even halfway off the couch when Bonnie's terse drawl stopped her. "Can we just move this along?"

All three of them turned to look at her. She was slumped into her armchair, legs curled beneath her, chin flattened against her palm, face drawn into a look that didn't seem particularly open to discussion. It was the first thing she'd said in a solid five minutes.

"Oh," Caroline said, shaking off her momentary surprise and easing back into the couch, "sure, no problem. In fact, I like the way you think." Her stare regained its wicked glitter as she cast it over the room. "Let's get back to crack-a-lackin'. Damon, whatcha got?"

His curious stare lingered on Bonnie for a second before flitting back over to Caroline's. "My turn?"

"Duh."

He heaved a slow, gusty sigh, knocking his head back against his seat. "Right. Uh, never have I ever…" he cast his gaze around in fruitless search, though after a second, it caught on Caroline: she was nodding her head none-too-subtly in Bonnie's direction.

"Get Bonnie," she mouthed, eyes glittery with mischief.

He arched a brow—seriously? She wanted him to go after Moody Judy over there?

"Do it!" she mouthed again, as if she could hear his reservations, and his eyes rolled—fine, whatever.

"Well, since our resident scowler seemed to like the topic of relationships earlier," he began, switching his stare back to Bonnie, "never have I ever ended a long-term relationship and acted like it's totally normal not to give a flying fuck."

A beat, and then razor-sharp green eyes slid up to meet his.

His lips lifted into a breezy smile in response. "Drinky, drinky."

She just held his gaze for a cutting moment, as if pondering exactly how long it'd take to slice him open and choke him with his own intestines, before lifting her cup and taking a wordless drink. Satisfied, he glanced over at Caroline—her eyes had blown into a 'what the fuck' look that made him frown innocently.

"Was that not what you had in mind?"

"I—" she balked a bit before shooting Bonnie a sheepish look, eyes rolling skyward. " _Fiiiine_. Busted. I was trying to get him to pull you into the game."

Bonnie arched a brow. "The game I clearly don't want to play?"

"Oh, _come_ on," Caroline said with a laugh, waving a hand at everyone, "we're having fun! In fact, you know what?" She sat up straight, flattening her hands against her knees. "Penalty shot. You get to come after me, no holds barred, no consequences, Cancún included." She flicked her hair out of her face before composing it into a stoic look. " _Go_."

Bonnie glanced at her cup with a loose shrug, absently fingering the rim. "Never have I ever changed my entire personality over a breakup that happened almost three years ago instead of actually dealing with it."

The shift in the room was immediate.

Stefan's stare flicked up in surprise. Caroline blinked. Damon's brows slowly ticked upward. Bonnie just continued messing with her drink, casual as can be, and the faint sound of a clock ticking joined the wind as the only sound in the room.

 _Yikes._

"Um." Caroline cleared her throat after a beat, lips flickering uncertainly, and Stefan's stare dropped to his hands.

"Bon—"

"No, it's fine," Caroline interjected before he could say anything, shaking it off and grabbing her cup. "Penalty shot's a penalty shot. Right for jugular, well done." She lifted the cup in an impressed toast before taking a large gulp, and Damon caught the way her mouth struggled to hold her smile as she swallowed.

His stare veered back over to Bonnie.

Weirdly low-blow, even for the drunken demon version of her. He didn't know a ton about Caroline, but it was pretty clear she cared a lot about what Bonnie thought—he'd seen her take insults before and she usually handled them with a smile and an eviscerating response.

"Alright, Stefan," Caroline said overly casually, trying to lighten the mood, "you're—" she paused at the sight of him lifting his cup to his mouth.

Stefan slowed his movements, frowning at her surprise. "What?" After a beat, his brows slid upward. "You think you have a monopoly on post-breakup identity crises?" He scoffed. "I avoided going home for like eight months after Elena. Hell, I read Catcher in the Rye fifteen times and actually _related_ to it." He lifted his cup in toast. "I earned this drink." He brought it back down and took a large swig.

Damon couldn't make out Caroline's face from the angle, but whatever it did, it caused the corners of Stefan's mouth to curl upwards. When she looked away, her features had loosened, the slightest of curves to her lips. "Steffy-bear," he said, tipping his cup toward him. "Never Have I Ever: Relationship Round—go."

"Right," Stefan said, brow furrowing as he attempted to pull himself back into the spirit the game. "Never have I ever… uh…" he shrugged after a moment, "lied in a relationship."

A sharp snort drew his stare to Bonnie before anyone else could react—she was staring at him with an amused look. "Seriously?"

His brows flicked upward. "What?"

"I guess you're not including to yourself."

His forehead gathered. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, _come_ on, Stefan," she said, gesturing at him with her cup. "No one gets cheated on for an entire year and has nooooo ideaaaaa about it. There were plenty of signs."

He just blinked at her for a second, processing the words. "Bonnie—"

"In fact, let's be real, it wasn't even just that year," she pressed, elevating the slowly climbing tension in the room. "Elena was nice and all, but girl was fake as hell—you might've seen it if you hadn't put her up on such a sky-high pedestal."

Stefan shook his head. "What are you—"

"You know exactly what I'm talking about," she interrupted with an amused scoff, cranking the tension up another buzzing notch. "Everyone knows what I'm talking about. You projected everything you wanted onto her—hell, you basically handed her a blueprint for your perfect dream girl and she was more than happy to play the part. I mean, Jesus, you treated her like the most flawless thing that ever happened to planet Earth, why wouldn't she keep the charade up?"

He set his drink down. "Okay—"

"And it's not just me that thinks this," she continued in a breezy voice, gliding right over him. "Ask anyone—ask Lexi. Hell, ask _Freya_. You two were a ticking time bomb and everyone knew it. Well, everyone except you, apparently." She shrugged, sloshing her cup around, and the air in the room was thick enough to slice. "People can only pretend to be something they're not for so long, dude. Unsurprisingly, after two years of being your perfect selfless unrealistic Disney princess, she hopped onto the douchiest, most materialistic dudebro dick she could fi—"

" _Bonnie_ ," Caroline snapped, staring at her with a sharp look of disbelief, and Bonnie frowned.

"What?"

"What do you mean, what?" She nodded her head at a fully tensed Stefan. "Back the hell off."

Bonnie's brows flew up in amusement. "Seriously? Since when do you give a shit about Stefan?" Her eyes settled into a glinting stare. "Or is it just that this hits too close to home, considering you're the queen of lying to yourself in relationships?"

Caroline looked like she'd just been slapped and Stefan sat up abruptly. "Okay, what the fucking hell, Bon?"

" _What_?"

"You're being a complete asshole is what."

"Oh, and I'm the only one that's not allowed to?" she countered, and his charged stare brightened with confusion.

"The hell does that mean?"

"It means you got high and blew up my living room and I had to chase you through a fucking blizzard, _Stefan,_ " she said, disbelieving laugh bubbling out of her throat. "It means you," she turned a bright, amused gaze to Caroline, "have done literally nothing but bitch and drink and make zero effort to make this situation any easier. It means you guys get to be assholes whenever you fucking want, and I don't say a word, I just let it slide—Bonnie the human stress test—but for some reason when I do it, when I let loose, it's an issue. " She brought her cup up, shoulders lifting into a harsh shrug. "I didn't even want to play this game, but here we are, doing whatever the hell you want, so likewise, I'm going to do whatever the hell I want." She took a deep, unapologetic swig and tossed the empty solo cup to the floor.

It was in the ringing silence that followed that Damon realized precisely what he was witnessing. The drinking, the destructiveness, the mood swings, the lashing out for seemingly no reason—it was her flashpoint. Every bottled up, everything's fine, life's wonderful, pseudo-well-adjusted person had one. That point where the happy face broke. Where all the repressed resentment came flooding out, caught fire, and scorched every well-meaning bystander in its path. He used to have one when he was younger—an elusive, unpredictable threshold at which every good thing he'd been forcing himself to feel suddenly sharpened into blades and sliced him open, letting all the dormant rage bleed out of him—but then it went away.

Largely because he'd stopped forcing himself to feel good things. He felt whatever the hell was in front of him, no better, no worse: if it was good, great—if it sucked, so be it. He'd learned a long ass time ago not to deal in optimism.

'Hope can't slice you open if you don't have any.'

Katherine Pierce's throaty drawl of a voice ringing in his head was enough to draw the corners of his lips up. He realized he missed her. He hadn't seen that lunatic in ages. Apparently that was the Wrong Move™, though, 'cause Bonnie's warpath of a stare suddenly fixed on him.

"Something funny?"

His gaze dropped down to hers, brow sliding upward. "What?"

"You're smiling."

"And?"

"Generally people smile when they find something funny."

His stare took on a slight gleam—was she trying to start shit with _him_ now? The thought made his lips flicker with amusement. _Wooo_ , buddy. Wrong target.

"And there it is again."

His eyes lit with incomprehension. "Are you just going to point out every time I do something, or…?"

"I just want to know what's so funny."

 _"_ Yeah, see, I think you just want to start a fight."

"Why would asking you what's funny start a fight?" she asked, shoulders lifting in a cool shrug. "Unless the answer's something that would piss me off."

"Pretty sure you're already pissed off, sweetheart."

"I'm not your sweetheart."

"And I'm not your punching bag," he countered, voice sharpening a bit beneath the frothy tone. His smile was light, general countenance blithe, but there was an edge to his gaze as he held her stare. "I mean, I don't really know what kind of no consequences system you have in place for coming after these two," he ventured, gesturing at Caroline and Stefan, "but it only seems fair to warn you: I bite back."

She snorted derisively. "Is that a threat?"

"Doesn't have to be."

"Alright," Stefan interjected, sitting forward a bit, "I think everyone just needs to take a minu—"

"What makes you think I'd care?" she bulldozed over him, stare bright with amusement as it held Damon's. "Like what are you going to do, hit on me to death? Tell me you don't believe in love for the thousandth time? Give me a lecture on how I should live my life as pointlessly as you do?" She slipped into a mocking chuckle. "'I bite back'—I don't care enough about what you think for it to be a 'bite', buddy."

"That's interesting, considering the timing of this little tantrum you're having," he drawled, and she scoffed.

"What does that mean?"

He paused for a beat before turning to look at her. She really wanted to do this? Fine. "It means that weirdly, ever since our little heart-to-heart last night, you've seemed just a _smidge_ off."

Her lips pursed in amusement. "Really."

"Yeah, really—first in the kitchen, then with your little cold shoulder routine in your room, and then with your sudden, inexplicable urge to get blasted at 8 in the morning." He smiled as she held his gaze. "Now, I don't have a fancy MD or anything, but it _kinda_ seems like you didn't like what I said to you last night, and it _kinda_ seems like it touched on some raging issues you don't like to deal with, and it _kinda_ seems like you handle them by pretending they don't exist, and it _kinda_ seems like you're used to being around people who either buy your act or let it slide, and it _kinda_ seems like you don't like the fact that I didn't, and it _kinda_ seems like you're reacting to that anger by getting shit-faced and snapping at everyone, but who knows?" He waved a hand, shoulders easing into a light, innocent little shrug that was at violent odds with the sharp glint in his eye. "I could be wrong."

Distantly, he saw Stefan and Caroline share a look, but his gaze remained fixed on the girl across from him. She was staring at him with largely the same cool expression she'd started out with, but it'd shifted slightly. Her jaw was tighter, features a little harder. The humorous glitter in her eyes had faded a bit. "You don't know me, Damon."

He winced, sucking air through his teeth. "See, the thing is, I think I do." He offered an apologetic shrug that was probably more mocking than it needed to be. "I actually know a lot of yous—foster care and all that—and I gotta say, not to call you predictable or anything, but you're _pretty_ textbook. I mean, it always starts with the parent drama, right?" He waved a bored hand. "Physically absentee mom, emotionally absentee dad, not enough love as a child, blah blah blah—and then that lack of validation turns you into some mega-overachiever, because naturally you're determined to prove your 'worth' or whatever." His fingers curled into air quotes. "So that leads to you constantly being surrounded by other overachievers, but the problem is that they aren't the _you_ kind, are they?"

She held his stare unblinkingly and he cocked his head to the side.

"They're the PTA mom, soccer-van-driving dad kind. The kind that grew up being told they could be anything they want to be. The—no offense, dude—Stefan kind. And so then what happens?" He shrugged. "Well, you hang out around privileged, happy, ambitious people long enough, you start to think like them, adopt their goals: career, marriage, kids, picket fence, hell, maybe even a labradoodle—and despite the fact that deep down, based on what you saw with your own two eyes, you know that all of those things are complete bullshit, you find yourself striving for that life anyway, telling yourself you believe in it because it's the closest you really get to feeling normal, you know?

"And _then_ ," he sighed, running a tired hand through his hair, "well, that's when you start getting into trouble, really, because this 'normal' existence of yours doesn't leave any room for your shitty, abnormal childhood and fucked up tendencies, does it? So what do you do: you distance yourself from them, put 'em in a nice little box covered in caution tape, shove it into some deep, dark corner of your mind and go about your life. Problem is, no matter how hard you try to ignore that little box of horrors, you feel it constantly. Clouding your thoughts. Shadowing that stubborn, adorable attempt at optimism.

"But," he gave a careless wave, "you go through the motions of normalcy anyway, because you're _bound and determined_ to see that charade through, and that's how you find yourself in long-term relationships you don't actually give a shit about." His stare glittered as it held hers. "That's how you end up overly investing in outside problems that make it easier to ignore your own. That's how you go months as the calm, collected, easygoing bookworm and then suddenly," he snapped his fingers together, "snap without warning. That's how you end up ruining a perfectly pleasant Never Have I Ever game by insulting the shit out everyone with the _audacity_ to be having a good time while you're in the middle of your biannual self-imposed crisis.

"And ultimately," he ventured with an air of finality, face settling into something slightly harder, "that's how you find yourself picking fights with someone like me. Someone who just," he waggled his fingers mysteriously, "inexplicably gets under your skin, puts you on the defensive. 'Cause deep down," he slowly began leaning forward, elbows dropping to his knees, "despite the dogged positivity, despite the goody-goody attitude, despite the judgy disapproval of the way I live life and the stubborn insistence that you're so different, you know that at any moment, at any point in your life, no matter how normal it may feel… " he clasped his hands loosely and cocked his head to the side, stare a dark, razor-edged blue, "chances are you're just a few disappointments and a couple tequila shots away from becoming me."

The silence in the room wasn't so much an absence of sound as an evisceration of it. There was no hum, no tick, no neigh of wind—the tension made the air too thick for it, blocked sound waves off at the source. Somewhere, distantly, Damon was aware of the fact that he might've gotten a bit carried away. Stefan was staring at the floor. Caroline was biting her lip. Bonnie, however, was staring straight at him, and for a solid ten seconds, she didn't do or say a single thing.

And then, without warning, she reached forward and grabbed a half empty bottle of champagne off the table. "I want a re-do."

Stefan's eyes closed. "Bon—"

"Never Have I Ever, real talk round." Her movements were sharp, jerky, countenance at violent odds with the surface-level calmness of her voice, and the overall effect was volatile. "What was the first one? Never have I ever robbed a house?" She snorted and took a harsh swig to indicate she had, though her brow promptly furrowed as she swallowed. "Actually, if I robbed two, does that mean I drink twice? I don't really know, this game's confusing."

Stefan began rubbing his hand against his forehead as Caroline sat stock still, wide eyes fixed on Bonnie.

"What was another one?" Bonnie waved the bottle vaguely. "Oh, right, never have I ever stolen a car—now _that_ is a story." Up went the bottle, and her jagged stare snapped over to Damon, falling into a brief wince as she swallowed. "Sorry, I know you thought you were special there. What was next? Never have I ever killed someone?" She pressed her lips together, stare veering skyward in thought. "Mm, can't say that I have, though I did manage to get my hands on a gun once while I was having a bad trip on shrooms, and _let me tell you_ ," she waved a hand with a dark chuckle, "close call."

"Bonnie, I really think you shou—"

"Never have I ever been on the run from the law—see, I kinda feel like I need to drink again for this one because honestly, it wasn't just Mexico." She took another swig, completely ignoring Stefan's attempt to intercept her spiraling. "Fun-fact: that's actually related to the whole stealing-a-car story, 'cause what we stole was a police cruiser. Whoops." She swung the bottle around in a 'what can you do' manner. "I feel like there were more, were there more?" She chewed her lip in thought and Caroline cleared her throat.

"I think that was it, actually."

"Really?" She frowned. "Huh, well then let's throw in some new ones: never have I ever spent the night in jail." Up went the bottle. "Never have I ever seen someone OD in front of me." Up went the bottle. "Never have I ever gotten so fucked up I couldn't remember an entire week of my life." Up went the bottle. "Never have I ever had sex with a complete stranger in a dive bar bathroom." Up went the bottle, only this time, she tossed it back all the way till the last of the champagne slid down her throat, and when she brought it back down, she pointed it at Damon. "But you know, the one thing I _can_ actually say is never will I _ever_ be in danger of becoming you."

Her stare slid down to his, a hard, vivid, broken-bottle-glass green. Her body was tightly coiled, every line of it radiating tension, but he couldn't help but notice the slightest sag to her shoulders, the way they inverted a bit, as if buckling under too much weight.

"Because I already _was_ you. For two long, hopeless fucking years—years I'll never get back, years that _sucked_." Her voice shook a bit on the last word, and the first real vestige of guilt managed to flicker through him. "And as a mostly recovered You that relapses on occasion, let me give you a little spoiler, bud." She leaned forward a bit, voice dropping into an unsteady hiss. "It doesn't end well. In fact, it ends with you waking up alone in an emergency room with no memory of how you got there, completely fucking terrified."

And with that, she tossed the empty bottle onto the coffee table, pushed herself up to her feet, and walked out of the living room.

The sound of glass skittering against wood was the only thing left in her wake.

* * *

 **Author's Note** : Hey, guys! Long time no see, how are the kids!? Just a quick note: this chapter was originally intended to be much longer, but I had to split it (again - plz love me), so bear with me through all this exposition 'cause a TON of fallout and action is coming up. Given that 12 is mostly written (I just have one big scene and then some filler), it should be up within a week. Thanks for your patience, y'all. This was a lot of drama and pacing to tackle, and I'm still learning how to write that, so if you have a second, let me know how I did ;)


	12. Boom

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Twelve: Boom_

* * *

Damon, Caroline, and Stefan formed a tense tableaux in the silent living room of Apartment 2B—a still life of stiff necks, uncertain hands, and drawn expressions. Damon was staring at his drink. Stefan had a hand around his jaw, rubbing it slowly with a dark, unfocused gaze. Caroline was sitting straight up, stiff as a board, unable to still her fidgeting fingers or the thoughts racing in her head.

Seven years of living together. One dorm room. Two different apartments. Thousands of conversations—conversations split over pans of 2 AM brownies, conversations with wine glasses on their plant mausoleum of a fire escape, conversations about life and the future and which shoes looked better with which dress—and not _once_ in their entire history as friends had Bonnie told her about any of the things she'd just rattled off.

She'd known about her parents. She knew that her mom wasn't in the picture and that she'd had a rocky relationship with her dad. She knew that they'd just started making progress when the car accident happened. She knew all of that, and she'd always marveled at how indestructible Bonnie was, how despite all the pain life threw at her, she managed to be one of the kindest, funniest, most genuine people Caroline had ever met.

And now, looking back, she felt sick to her stomach.

No one was indestructible. No one. Caroline knew that better than anyone, because _hell_ if she didn't try to be every goddamn day. And sure, she'd seen Bonnie have off days, she'd seen her withdraw and get moody and disappear for a few hours to go dance alone in the Arts building, but it was only ever exactly that: a few hours. Maximum a day. And then she was right back to Ninja Turtle socks and snarky laughter and bitching about biochemistry. Or at least that's what Caroline had thought.

Her stomach twisted into a knot.

How could she have thought that? No one weathered pain unscathed, and no one should've ever been expected to, and yet somehow, over seven years, Caroline had managed to accept the idea that that's exactly what Bonnie was doing. Navigating life unscathed. Staring tragedy in the face and going 'not today'. And of course she wasn't. Jesus Christ, of _course_ she wasn't, how self-centered did Caroline have to be to not see it? How many signs must she have missed? Had Bonnie spiraled at all while they were in college? Were those times she got extra shit-faced more than just her letting loose?

Her knuckles were white with tension as her entire body buzzed.

Bonnie had ridden in on a white horse to save Caroline more times than she could count—sometimes from spiders, sometimes from spending the night passed out in their hallway in a mini-dress, and sometimes from bigger, darker things—and the idea that she'd somehow missed something, that'd she'd passed up a chance to return the favor, turned her skin inside out.

Which was exactly what drove her to rocket up to her feet and abandon her drink on the table with a clatter.

Stefan's sightless stare sharpened as it jumped over to her. "What are yo—"

"I can't just sit here," she snapped, frazzled, stepping past him to circumnavigate the coffee table. He swept up to his feet and blocked her path, lifting his palms to back her up, and her stare flared with ferocity. "Stefan," she hissed, voice sharp enough to slice, " _move_."

"You don't know what you're dealing with, Caroline."

"I don't fucking _care_."

" _Yes_ , you do, because if you waltz in there right now without knowing what you're up against, you're going to make it worse."

Caroline scoffed, gesturing to the chair Bonnie had been sitting in. "How much worse than that can it get!?"

"Caroline—"

She pushed past him with an angry shove and he let out a sharp breath.

" _A lot._ " The sudden flare of volume prompted her to slow down and turn back to look at him, and he scrubbed a hand over his face. "A _lot_ worse." His tense gaze lifted to hers. "It can get a lot worse."

She stared at him for a second, body buzzing with nerves. He wasn't exaggerating in his goody-goody, overcautious way. She could tell. It made her blood feel like lead. "Okay, so, what?" she pressed, waving a desperate hand around. "We do nothing? We just sit here while she has a traumatic breakdown in the next room?"

"No," he said, shaking his head, "of course not, I just—"

"Then _what_?" she exclaimed, words coming out more and more frantic. "Write her a card? Make her some fucking soup?"

"Caroline, calm—"

"We can't just leave her alone, Stefan, someone has to go after her!"

" _I know that_ , and it's going to be me, but you have to let me come up with some kind of gamepla—"

"I'll go."

Damon's voice was gruff and unexpected, and both of their heads whipped around to stare at him. He set his drink down calmly and pushed himself to his feet, and Caroline let out a furious scoff.

"Like _hell_ you're going."

"Yeah, I think you've done enough," Stefan agreed, a hard edge to his voice, and Damon let out a dark sigh, lifting his gaze to Stefan's.

"That's exactly my point." He waved a tense hand. "I've done more than enough—in fact, I've done pretty much all of the things she just listed and then some, so if anyone has a shot in hell of making her feel like anything other than a zoo exhibit right now, I'm guessing it's me."

Stefan's face flickered slightly as Caroline's brightened with disbelief. "That's your logic?" she exclaimed with a scoff. "You've done more fucked up stuff than we have so you, a stranger, are the best choice for comforting _our_ friend?"

"Comforting? No. Handling? Yes."

Caroline's eyes thinned. "She doesn't need _handling_ , Damon, she needs her friends, she's upset—"

"She's not upset, Locks, she's furious."

" _How the hell would you_ —"

"I think you should go talk to her."

They both turned to look at Stefan, who'd been silent for a beat. He was staring at Damon.

Caroline's eyes thinned. " _What_?"

He glanced at Caroline. "The first time I tried to help Bonnie when she was like this, she told me I made her feel like a sideshow attraction. Those were her exact words. That I was just staring at her like she could grow an extra head at any moment and she _hated_ it. She hated me." He shrugged darkly, helplessly. "I tried to comfort her, I tried to get her to talk, tried to distract her, but when she gets like this it's just…" he shook his head, dropping his gaze, "…it's pure _rage_. It's like everything she's bottled up explodes all at once and all you can try to do is weather it." His stare flickered back up to hers. "Damon's right. She's not looking for a friend right now. She's looking for a target."

Caroline struggled to process this. She struggled to reconcile it with the girl who routinely sat cross-legged on their counter debating whether or not Cheerios could be considered baby donuts. With the girl who yelled 'WITNESS ME' every time she managed to crack an egg without breaking the yoke, regardless of if anyone else was in the kitchen. The girl who 'mopped' by smacking a pair of wet wipes on the bottom of her slippers and jamming out to Party Rock Anthem. The easy-going blast of warmth who'd been her best friend and Yoda for seven years.

"I'll be the target," she declared, fingers closing into tight fists at her sides, and Stefan sighed.

"Caroline—"

"She needs a target, I'll be a target— _move_ ," she gritted out as Damon stepped in front of her, and he shot an exasperated look to the ceiling.

"Locks, I did this, alright?" He dropped his gaze back down to hers. "I pissed her off, this is my mess—let me take the heat for it."

"It's your mess but it's my best friend!"

"And I will get her through the night in one piece and have her bright, shiny and new for you in the morning, but you've got to let me handle this."

She pressed her lips together before shooting a sharp glance at Stefan. His shoulders lifted darkly. "She'll feel a lot less guilty tomorrow about ripping into him than she would ripping into you." She barely had a second to mull over the words before a muffled series of _thuds_ sounded from Bonnie's room.

They all glanced over apprehensively, and Caroline clenched her jaw. God, she hated this. "Fine." Damon veered his stare back to her. "Go. But I swear to fucking _God_ , Damon, if you make this wo—"

" _Locks_ ," he interjected, and his typically confident voice had softened a bit, causing some of her vitriol to quell. For the first time, she caught a faint trace of guilt in his expression. "I got this."

She held his gaze for long, severe beat, nerves buzzing wildly inside her, before nodding stiffly. Damon eased around to head over to Bonnie's room and Caroline grabbed him by the arm. "Please just," she closed her eyes as he glanced over his shoulder, and her voice took on a pleading note. "Just don't fuck this up."

After a tense moment, he let out a light, barely audible scoff. "And risk death by sequined throw pillow?" Her stare flickered open sharply—this _wasn'_ t funny—but despite the drollness of his expression, his gaze was unexpectedly sincere. "She'll be fine."

She exhaled tightly. "She'd better."

He switched his stare to Stefan and held up a loose thumbs up. "Everyone cool? Can I go volunteer as tribute now?"

Stefan gestured to Bonnie's door with a tired look, signaling his okay, and Damon set off across the living room to her room. He gave a brief knock on her door. "Witchy," he called after a few seconds of silence, giving another, louder knock, and a response came in the form of a muffled _bang_. He sighed and shot Caroline and Stefan a resigned look. "Let the 75th annual Hunger Games begin."

And with that, he opened the door and disappeared inside the dark room, swinging it shut behind him with a flick of his wrist.

Caroline immediately rounded on Stefan. "I hate this."

He sighed. "I don't love it."

"Then why are we doing it? We don't even know what he's going to say!"

"You heard him, Caroline." He lifted a harassed hand. "He's been through this—hell, he's been through the foster system. If anyone's got a shred of an idea of what she's feeling, it's him, and he proved it by already knowing things it took me years to figure out."

She shook her head, barely listening as she sunk into the armchair and closed her eyes. Her skin felt hot. "I can't believe I'm not in there right now." She let out a shaky breath and dropped her head into her hands, shoulders gathered in a tight hunch around her neck. "Bonnie's been there for me so many times, Stefan, I just—I can't believe I'm not…"

"Hey," he said, and his voice had softened into the same gentle tenor he'd used with her the night before. For a split second, she was right back in that bathtub with him, watching the morning sun bloom across the sky. "I know what you're feeling, alright?" She shook her head rapidly to clear the memory. "I used to feel the same thing—like I was somehow failing her by not being able to fix it, like it made me this horrible friend—but after awhile, I figured out that being there for someone isn't always as straightforward as literally standing beside them."

She lifted a wary gaze up to his, and it was warm and frank. "Sometimes it's recognizing that what's best for someone in a particular situation _isn't_ you. That it isn't about us and what role we think we're supposed to play—it's about what role that person actually needs us to play. And after going through this a few times, I can tell you pretty confidently that what she needs from you and me is to be there in the morning, cooking breakfast and bickering over coffee, just as much her best friends as we were the day before."

She bit her lip as she considered the words, and he gave a light shrug. "That's how we tell her we're not going anywhere. And if she wants to talk about it, we're all in, but if she doesn't," he waved a hand, "we go right back to fighting over what's going in the omelet and keeping her from grabbing the pop tarts."

She lapsed into a hoarse laugh despite herself. "She's so dumb about pop tarts."

His lips quirked. "She really is."

She lifted an unsteady hand to rub her throbbing temple, shaking her head. "She's brought pop tarts to so many potlucks that people don't even tell her it's a potluck anymore."

"That sounds like her."

"I hate her."

He chuckled. "Me, too."

She stared at the storm raging past the window for a few seconds before dropping her head into her hands, sighing shakily. "That girl's my hero, Stefan."

His stare flickered down to his hands, and after a beat of nothing but whistling wind, his voice softened to a murmur.

"Me, too."

* * *

When it came to volatile women with rough childhoods and questionable coping mechanisms, this wasn't Damon's first rodeo.

Hell, it wasn't even his 50th.

Thus, it came as little surprise when the first thing he saw upon shutting the door behind him was a move straight out of the Katherine Pierce playbook: Bonnie's slight frame already halfway out of her second story window. "Hey," he said, surging forward with large, loping strides until he could grab hold of her shoulder, "what do you think you're doing?"

She shrugged him off in a hasty motion. "Leaving."

"Cool, did you forget the part about the lethal blizzard?" he countered, noting the fact that she wasn't even wearing real shoes, and she ignored him, pushing her torso over the ledge. "Bonnie," he sighed, not super used to being the one who kept people from doing stupid shit instead of the one encouraging it, and when she merely scoffed out a 'go away' in response, he clenched his jaw and hooked an arm around her waist.

"Hey!" she snapped, squirming as he yanked her back inside. She burst out of his grip the moment her feet touched the floor and whirled around with a searing look. "What the fuck, dude?"

"See that white stuff out there?" he asked, waving a sarcastic hand at the window. "It's called snow, and it kills morons who decide to stroll around in it in pajamas."

Her gaze slitted. "I'll put on a jacket."

" _Mm_ , yeah, still going to die."

" _Mm,_ yeah, still going to go."

He sighed and grabbed her arm as she made to swivel around again, and her stare snapped back up to his in a flare of disbelief. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Let fucking _go_."

"Nope."

"Why the hell not?"

"Not letting you out there."

Her brows lifted in a slow, caustic arch. "Not _letting_ me?" She eased a charged step closer, head tilting to the side. "What gave you the idea that I need your permission?"

He pursed his lips, pretending to consider the question. "I'd say the fact that I'm bigger than you, stronger than you, and in an annoying twist of events, the one that's thinking more practically."

The corners of her mouth quirked in a mirthless flicker. "I can drop you in two seconds, asshole."

His brows raised in blithe consideration. "You can certainly tr—" A sudden hand shot down to catch the knee she'd aimed straight at his crotch, bringing it to a dead-halt a mere inch from its target. His eyes tapered at the corners. "Really?"

"Nope—just the distraction."

And before he could even blink, her elbow was flying straight at his chin. He yanked her around by the knee and flattened her against him in a detaining hold, her back to his front, though not before she'd managed to graze his jaw with a half-landed blow. He winced a bit as she struggled against him, opening and closing his mouth to stretch it.

 _Fuck_ , that hurt.

"What is your _problem_?" she gritted out as she tried to break his grip, genuinely baffled by his interest in keeping her alive, and he scoffed.

"You just decked me in the jaw, Rocky—if anyone has a problem here, it's you."

"Let me fucking go!"

"You're going to hurt yourself," he warned as she fought him harder, sharp shoulder blades jabbing against his chest, and she let out a frustrated breath.

"Why do you care?"

"Because I—" he winced as her elbow caught his side—for _Christ's sake_ , "pissed you off and now you're lashing out."

She let out a sudden laugh, dry and unexpected, and to his surprise, her thrashing slowed in his arms. "Is that really what you think?" She leaned back after a beat, head knocking against his chest to meet his gaze from below. _"_ You didn't piss me off, Damon." Her eyes were amused and glitteringly bitter. "Life did."

It was a familiar sentiment. "I get that."

"Oh, I'm sure you do," she drawled, slowly starting to ease their twined frames in a side-to-side motion, like some kind of dance. "Which is why you," she took hold of one of his hands, "are going to let me go, because _you_ ," she lifted their joined arms and spun beneath them, as if he were twirling her, "understand that what I need right now," she circled out into a slow, flourishing finish, "is to get out of this apartment."

He sighed as she dropped his hand and turned right back to the open window, lifting a knee to climb onto the ledge. "I do understand that." He moved forward and squeezed between her and the ledge, blocking her access with his stocky frame and gritting his teeth against the bitter cold biting through the cotton of his shirt. "But unfortunately for you, I also understand hypothermia, so you need to find another outlet."

She scoffed out a laugh. "Like what, Damon? More alcohol? Another stupid game? What?" Her eyes were bright with a quiet rage as she took a step forward, the amusement disappearing from her voice. "I don't want to be here right now, I don't want to talk to you, I don't want to look at everyone's 'concerned' faces, I don't want to fucking _think_ , I just—"

"Want to blank out— _trust me, sweetheart_ , I know," he bit back, voice taking on a low growl. "I know that well, and under different circumstances, I'd be all for it—hell, I'd probably tag along—but this right here?" He pointed at her charged, unstable state. "This is my fault, and you're not going to get yourself killed over it, so I'll say it one more time." His head dropped to level with hers, eyes sharp and unblinking. "Find. Another. Outlet."

She merely stared at him for a beat. Her face was cold, combative, eyes dissecting his like scalpels, searching for a weakness to exploit, and his lips gave a humorless uptick in return. Search away, doll. He could keep this up all night.

"Fine."

And suddenly her tank top was over her head and thoughtlessly discarded into the darkness. His brows lifted on instinct, gaze flitting over her torso and snagging on the nipples poking through her flimsy bra in the cold. "What are yo—" his voice caught when two assertive hands pushed him back against the ledge of the window.

"We're doing it your way," she said, climbing onto him in a thoroughly derailing straddle and wrapping her arms around his neck.

Fuck. "Bonnie—"

Her mouth cut him off in a swell of heat, pliant body pressing into his, and for a second his brain just grayed out entirely, structured thoughts melting into fragments. She felt like liquid against him in the frigid air—thick, warm, dizzying liquid, pooling into every dip and valley of his stiff frame and slowly sinking into his skin. He forced himself to break away after a few disorienting seconds. "Bon," he growled stiffly, swallowing some of the thickness in his throat, "this—"

She caught his mouth again before he could finish, blanking him out, and _fuck_ , she knew what she was doing. Her lips were unexpectedly sweet against his—soft, indulgent, deceitfully innocent—and somehow, it was hotter than anything else she could've done, because he knew what was underneath that fake sweetness. He knew that there was nothing remotely innocent going through her head in that moment. He knew that every soft little nip of her lips was a breathy murmur of 'in five minutes you won't be able to see straight' and it was making the line between 'good idea' and 'bad idea' severely start to blur.

She was teasing him. Blatantly. And despite the distant echo of ' _abort mission'_ ringing somewhere in his head, he felt his hand slowly, instinctively lift, fingertips coasting up the bare skin of her back to curl around her neck.

And that was apparently all it took.

The switch flipped. The act dropped. Playful became aggressive. Soft became rough. Fingers clenched, nails dug, lips caught between teeth, hot and hungry and combative as all hell, so much so that she actually fucking _bit_ him—a sharp growl hummed in the back of his throat at the metallic taste of blood in his mouth. He pulled back gruffly, flooded stare landing on hers, and her eyes glittered as she slid a slow tongue over the sharp line of her teeth. He felt his blood thicken with arousal. That was how she wanted to play this? He dropped a hard grip to her thighs, yanking her onto his lap in a rough tug that jostled her whole body, and he felt her lips curl against his before pulling him into another bruising kiss.

Christ, he wanted her.

Wanted to scoop her up and pin her against every goddamn wall in the room.

Wanted to knock everything off her wreck of a desk and make her forget everything she'd ever learned on it.

Wanted to explore every hot-skinned inch of her against her flowery sheets till she dug her nails in so hard she tore them.

Her hips began to move in a grind against his, spiking his blood with adrenaline, and he felt his entire circulatory system rerouting. All he could see in his head was that shit-starting green stare of hers—daring him to underestimate her, flickering with delight, mentally slicing him to pieces over the coffee table during Never Have I Eve—

He stiffened slightly. Never Have I Ever. Drinking. Drama. Stefan. Caroline. 'Just don't fuck this up.' Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, _noooopity nope nope_ what the _fuck_ was he _—_

" _Hey,_ " he growled as he forced himself to pull back, jaw clenching from the mental effort it took. She slowly eased her head to the side, face shrouded in shadow.

"Hey," she murmured back. Her gaze was glinting, hips working his in a rhythm that spoke volumes of her skill as a dancer, and he struggled to get ahold of himself for a few seconds. This was brutal. This was next-level brutal. She was rough and sweet and grinding into his lap in nothing but a ridden-up pair of pajama shorts and fucking _slippers_ and she'd been winding him up all day and it was all so goddamn bewilderingly ho—

He exhaled tightly to stay focused. "Not this."

"No?"

"Nope."

She gave him a pouty frown, slipping a hand up his neck and raking her nails against his scalp. "But we were having so much fun."

"Bonnie," he tried again, dropping his hands to her thighs to still them, and she took advantage of the distraction and began kissing her way up his jaw. His stare flew shut: Christ, how the hell had he gotten himself into this? Stefan and Caroline were going to kill him.

"You once told me," she murmured upon reaching his ear, fingers clenching at the nape of his neck, and yep, she wasn't kidding about the hair-pulling thing, "that you could double the number of orgasms I've had in a night." Her free hand reached down for one of his and slowly dragged it up her inner thigh, hot breath ghosting against his earlobe. "Prove it."

Yeah, he had to ax this now.

Without bothering to respond, he scooped her up and got to his feet, pointedly ignoring the laugh that chimed in the air—it was a loose and throaty rumble against his ear and every last part of him wanted to turn it into a groan. Instead, he maneuvered them across the room and dropped her on the mattress with an unceremonious _thunk_.

She scrambled up to a sitting position in a graceless kick of sheets. "What the hell?"

"Go to sleep, Bonnie."

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

"Do I look like I'm kidding?"

"You look like a _dick_." He snorted at the vain attempt at an insult and her eyes thinned in bewilderment. "What is your _deal_ , man? We've been here for four days and you've been all party this, innuendo that, and now that that's actually useful to me in some way, you're a friggin' priest?"

He scrubbed a strained hand over his face. "Enjoying it about as much as you are."

"Then stop," she snapped, pushing herself up onto her knees to face him. "I don't need that—everyone else might think that, but you _?_ " She gestured at him with a scoff. "You're the king of this! When you're drunk and taking some random girl home, is that a cry for help? Is that you being some out-of-control person who needs someone to babysit you and save you from yourself? Or do you _maybe_ just want to screw someone for the mind-numbing hell of it?"

He let out a humorless laugh. "You really don't want to compare yourself to me, kid."

Her gaze slitted. "Oh, but you already did. Exact same kind of fucked up, remember?"

"Misread."

" _Mmm_ , no," she hummed, demeanor slowly shifting back to sly as she began edging closer to him, knees nudging forward. His body tensed slightly: seductive-mode. Great. "You heard my little rap sheet back there. I think you were on to something."

He eyed her approaching body warily. "I think I barely knew you."

"I think you still barely know me," she replied, reaching out for the waistband of his sweats and giving it a rough tug forward, hands immediately slipping beneath the hem of his shirt, "and should get to know me better."

His jawline was flared in restraint, muscles jumping beneath her skimming fingertips. "Disagree."

"Really?"

"Thoroughly."

"Shame." She shifted the direction of her hands, dragging them down the tightening ripple of his abdomen. "'Cause I had some pretty fun stuff in mind." She slipped her fingers beneath the elastic of his pants and a surge of adrenaline flooded his veins at the feather-light friction—for fuck's sake, why hadn't he just let her climb out the window? He tried to will himself to intervene, caught in a war between logic and nerve endings, but he must've taken too long, 'cause she took advantage of the hesitation and slipped a decisive hand around his erection.

His nostrils flared instinctively—fucking hell.

"Does it feel like you thought?" she teased, beginning to ghost a loose fist over the length of him and Jesus fucking _Christ_ , he couldn't handle this. "And don't even try to pretend you haven't been thinking about it." He almost let out a hoarse laugh—of fucking course he'd been thinking about, he'd been thinking about it ever since her little stunt in the closet. He felt his defenses caving alarmingly fast, the restraint straining his limbs dissipating with every defiant swirl of her thumb, and he dropped his hands against the mattress to try and gather himself, eyes falling shut.

"You're drunk," he finally gritted out, struggling to stay focused.

"So are you."

"Not the same."

"Completely the same," she countered, slowly working her hand up to a rhythm that had his breaths shortening, hands clenching into fists around her sheets, and for an unsettlingly extended beat, instinct threatened to take over—so much so that when he lifted a hand, he had no idea if it was going to pull her closer or push her away. "Both drunk, both bored, both want it—"

It ended up grabbing her wrist and bringing it to a halt. "You don't want this."

"Yes, I do."

" _No_ , you don't," he managed through a clenched jaw, "and once you snap out of this super healthy drunken alter ego of yours, you'll remember that."

" _Aw_ , come on, Captain Coitus," she purred, slowly beginning to brush a light thumb along the length of him, and the sensation was immediately overwhelming, "don't sell yourself short." Her expression lightened into something playful. "There's really nothing short about you."

His blown pupils snapped ceiling-ward in search of some kind of divine intervention.

"Besides," she pressed on, thumb taking on a figure eight motion that made his blood feel like it was carrying a current, "you don't have to think of it as sex if you're convinced that's such a problem for me. Think of it as therapy," she eased closer with a flickering smile, "catharsis," she nipped his lip, "two people bonding over their abandonment issues."

His eyes shut as he gritted out an offhanded, "I don't have abandonment issues."

Her movements unexpectedly slowed, head drawing back to stare at him. "What?"

His stare flickered open. Really? That was all it took to slow her down? "I said I don't have abandonment issues," he repeated, pointblank, dropping his stare back down to hers, and she blinked at him for a second, a flash of bafflement in her gaze.

And then, after a loaded pause, "Oh, fuck off." His brows shot up as she pulled her hand back, shoving him hard and detangling herself from him. "Fuck _all the way_ _off_ —you seriously have the fucking nerve, _"_ she said with a bitter laugh, "to lecture me on how I deal with things when you won't even admit your own problems?"

His brow furrowed, bewildered by the turn of mood. "I didn't say—"

"'Cause suddenly you're perfect, right?" she bulldozed through him, eyes bright with indignation. "You target me, get under my skin, convince me you're some kind of fucked up ally in this to try to get me to break and then when I do, you suddenly 'don't have issues'?"

His eyes were blazing with incomprehension. "I didn't—"

"You," she laughed, "with your borderline alcoholism and sex addiction and whatever the fuck else, don't have _fucking issues_ like is that a _joke_?"

His lips pressed together, eyes flashing up to the ceiling. "I didn't say I didn't have issues, I said I didn't have abandonment issues."

Her laughter merely intensified, hands flying up in the air. "Your mother left you!"

"No, your mother left you."

"And now you're pivoting!"

"No, you're projecting."

"Ooo, fancy psych term—wanna know another one? Denial."

"I'm not—"

"Like it's clear as fucking day that your parents screwed you up but you can't even ad _mit_ it to yourself—"

His jaw tightened in rising tension. "I never—"

"—yet you have the goddamn balls to go around telling _me_ I don't deal with _my_ shit—"

His teeth clicked together in a grind. "I wasn't—"

"—all in the name of what, some superiority kick? Getting off on feeling like you aren't the most messed up person here?"

"Can I just _fucking—"_

"—that somehow, in contrast to the train wreck I am, you're _totally_ fine with being left behi—"

" _My parents didn't leave me behind_ ," he snarled, voice so suddenly, unexpectedly raw that it sliced right through her words. His gaze was bright, volatile, nostrils flared in a swell of rage that'd taken over him so swiftly that he couldn't contain it, couldn't shove it into the box he usually kept it in, she was just so fucking _wrong_. "They didn't care enough to leave me—I had to pick up the phone and call the State Department and beg them to get me the hell out of there! I left _them._ "

She merely stared at him, unblinking, as he took a step closer, eyes radiating ferocity. "You think I can't admit my parents fucked me up?" he seethed, bewildered by the absurdity of the accusation. "My mom was a narcissistic fucking _psychopath_. My dad was a spineless piece of _shit_. I have a fucking bullet wound from where they used 9-year-old me as a human shield during a drug bust." He snapped a hand up to wrench down the collar of his shirt, exposing the ugly reality behind the scar he'd lied to Caroline about earlier.

Her gaze traced over it in silence. His knuckles were white with tension, stare bladed as it held hers, daring her to tell him _one_ more goddamn time about his issues, about shit she had no idea about. "So when I say I don't have abandonment issues," he hissed through gritted teeth, taking a combative step closer, "it's because turning those assholes over to the police was the best thing I ever did. In fact, I _wish_ they'd abandoned me, 'cause you want to know what's worse than good people leaving, Bon?" She held his gaze as he took a final step forward, dropping his head to level with hers. Heat was radiating off him in waves, thick with bitterness, and after a charged, humming moment, he felt his hot veins flood with ice. "Bad people staying."

The words were a cold mutter against her lips, faces a breath apart, blisteringly intimate—he felt rawer and more exposed now than he had with her hand around him. For a second, they merely stood there, shrouded in shadow. His pulse was elevated, adrenaline trying to block off the inevitable beginnings of regret creeping in—he didn't talk to people like this. Raw, split-open, naked—he didn't fucking do it, he couldn't stand the reactions, the way people would compose their faces into saccharine symphonies of sympathy only to get distracted by a text or tinder notification two seconds later, reducing the weight of his life into an afterthought that might, if deemed juicy enough, resurface as dinner table gossip.

He made it a joke first.

Devalued it before they could.

Discussed it with all the gravity of a tweet so that people would skip the empty platitudes and go straight to what they were really feeling: curiosity. Morbid interest. A desire to be entertained, to hear a story they could tell their friends about over drinks later. 'You know Damon from VC? Dude has the most _fucked up_ life.' It was less depressing to have people be upfront about how shitty they were than to watch them do a whole song and dance about pretending to care—people only gave a shit about themselves. _He_ only gave a shit about himself. His parents were an introduction to that, and the rest of his life was a resounding encore, so why the fuck was he laying it all out to an ex-hook up's _roommate_?

"Didn't realize it was a competition."

Her throaty voice took him by surprise, it'd been silent for so long. Her gaze was hooded, jaw locked. "What?'

"Our lives," she replied, shoulders lifting into a jerky shrug, and he suddenly realized she was angry. Searingly angry. Well, that was a new one. "You know, who had the shittier childhood. Is there an award?" His lips pressed together at the frigid mockery. "A ribbon? Trophy? Some certificate that gives you a government-sanctioned monopoly on being hurt?"

He let out a scoff, stare averting in irritation. "You started this, kid."

That seemed to piss her off further. "Really."

"It was a correction, not a competition—you misunderstood and I corrected."

"By saying bad people staying is worse than good people leaving."

His jaw tightened a bit at the quote. "I didn't—"

"Let me tell you something about good people leaving, _kid_ ," she growled, the derision knife-like in her voice, mixing with an unexpected flare of emotion that made it waver slightly. "'Cause it may not be dodging bullets or bad people treating you the same fucked up way they treat everyone else, but it is perfectly sane, capable-of-love people giving you a once-over and deciding that you— _specifically you_ , a kid who thinks the world of them—are worthless."

He held her luminously bitter stare as her face edged closer, eyes starting to grow a bit red. "You don't get the luxury of hating people who leave you. You want to, _God_ , you really fucking want to," her nostrils flared as she gave a hoarse, unsteady laugh, "but you never fully do, because you can't shake off the idea that you were the problem. You can tell yourself you never want to see them again—I did it all the time, told myself I was better off without my mom, told myself I didn't care about what my dad thought—but it was bullshit, such complete, delusional bullshit. Anytime my Dad would spare me a glance, I'd light up. The four months when my mom came back were the happiest I'd ever been. It's pathetic." Her voice cracked, shoulders lifting into a sharp, furious shrug. "You become pathetic. They can hurt you over and over and over again and you never get over wanting them to love you. Ever. Even when they spend your whole life completely ignoring you. Even when they come back after leaving you for thirteen years, take one look at you, and leave again. Even when you go off the rails and lash out and tell them you hate them—there's always a buried part of you just fucking _begging_ for them to care, because Jesus Christ, why, _why_ don't they care?"

A rogue tear flashed down her cheek and she averted her gaze, hastily swiping it away. "I don't have the luxury of thinking my parents were shit people who I'm lucky to have gotten away from. I don't have the luxury of being ecstatic I'll never see them again. I don't even have the luxury of thinking the world sucks, and make no mistake, that's a luxury, because it saves you from having to blame yourself. All I have is a crippling fear that there's something inherently wrong with me, something I've somehow gotten good at hiding from people, and that it's only a matter of time before everyone else I love manages to figure it out."

Her face was hard, gaze raw and fierce and vulnerable in roughly equal measure, and something about the combination struck him, imprinting onto his mind in a hazy polaroid. "You've grown up thinking the world's the problem. I've grown up thinking that I am." She gave him a hard once-over, voice thinning into a wavering hiss. "And fuck you if you think that's so much easier."

Her words lingered in the air between them. He felt stiff, unsure, buzzing. He didn't know how to process that, how to relate at all. She was right—he didn't blame himself for his parents. He'd hated them from so early on that the idea of their rejection even mattering to him seemed insane. Hell, he took it as a fucking compliment. What he did know was seeing her thinking so lowly of herself wasn't something he was enjoying.

Fortunately, she made it clear she was entirely uninterested in any kind of response when she slipped off the bed and shoved past him, heading for the door. "Where are you—"

"I'm changing, Stalin," she growled over her shoulder, reaching back to undo the bra she had on and flinging it off with a flick of her wrist.

His gaze instinctively skimmed down the bare curve of her back before forcing itself ceiling-ward, giving her about two minutes before venturing a glance back down: she was bent over in a swallowing T-shirt that came down to her thighs, wrapping her curls in a satin scarf.

"You can go now."

"I'm not going anywhere."

"I'm going to bed."

"Cool."

She straightened back up with a scoff. "In case you missed it, the whole sex thing's off the table."

"Very aware."

"As in you're not sleeping with me."

"My line before it was yours."

"So you're just going to what, stand there all night?"

"Actually," he began, heading over to the window and closing it before sinking into the armchair beside it with a tired sigh, "I'm going to sit here all night." He scrunched his nose. "Maybe sleep a little, if you're good."

Her stare was blistering. "Seriously."

"Seriously."

"You're going to watch me sleep."

"I see it more as 'I'm going to watch you not sneak out of your room'."

She blinked at him for a few seconds before lapsing into a sharp, mirthless laugh. "You know what? I don't even care, do what you want."

"Always do."

"Guess you're the only one that can," she bit back with a cutting smile before turning around and climbing into her mess of sheets. He watched her settle into her bed with a drawn look, unsurprised to see her turn her back to him and hurl the covers over her head. It took a minute or two for her breathing to settle, and about ten for it to hit the deep, even rhythm that meant she was probably asleep.

He let out a low sigh, dropping his head against the chair back and staring at the ceiling, trying to blank his thoughts out. She had some kind of diagram up there—a heart or a lung or something, he couldn't tell in the dark—and he traced the faint lines with his eyes. He couldn't imagine ever wanting to be a doctor. Not just because he couldn't imagine putting himself through that much school and training and bullshit. He just couldn't imagine asking anyone to put their life in his hands. He'd probably panic. He didn't even know what to do with his own. It seemed to fit Bonnie, though.

He continued to stare at the diagram absently. How had she even gotten it up there? His head lit with a vague image of her standing on this chair, stretched to her tiptoes, expression all ferocityand determination as she struggled to reach the ceiling. It reminded him of when she'd gotten stuck in the snow a few nights ago. She'd just been planted there in all her fun-sized glory, green eyes bright and miserable, curls plastered to her face beneath her purple beanie. It was strange to think that was the same girl.

A flicker of motion shifted his attention back to the present, and he glanced down at the lump of sheets in her bed. She stirred in her sleep, mumbling something muffled before turning over to the other side. She was facing him now, eyes closed and hands gathered into loose fists under her chin, and a dim slant of light from the window illuminated her face. Her brows were drawn low over her eyes. The angles of her face were tensed. Her mouth was in a tight line. Her fists clenched every few seconds only to release again. Even with the distance, he could see her eyelids fluttering.

She was dreaming, and from the looks of it, it was nothing good.

He watched her body slowly rise and fall, and for a second, all he could see was a twelve-year-old Tyler Lockwood writhing around in his Spiderman bed, struggling to fend off another round of nightmares. He felt his jaw tense.

Parents were really something else.

* * *

"I think we should check again."

"Caroline."

"It's too quiet, don't you think it's too quiet?"

"We've checked three times—she's sleeping."

"Right, but what if she woke up?"

"I'd imagine it'd be a lot less quiet."

"But don't you think we should make sure?"

"Actually, I think every time we go in there, we risk waking her up."

Caroline sighed and pushed a stressed hand through her hair, forcing a nod, and Stefan stared at her, brows arched. He honestly couldn't believe he'd spent three years convinced she wasn't capable of caring about anything. Bonnie had always said she was just selective about what she let into her life, and that once she cared about something, she was a rabid lion mom, but he'd never really believed it until now.

"I'm just worried," she said in a clipped mutter, dropping her chin against her tightly folded hands, and his lips couldn't help but quirk at the understatement.

"I'm getting that."

She lifted a harassed hand. "I mean, aren't you?"

"Yeah, Caroline, I am, but not about anything happening right now," he said, shoulders lifting. "Right now, the worst is over. Getting her to sleep is half the battle. I'm worried about tomorrow, worried about how this is going to affect her for the next few days."

"Well, okay, great, then let's prepare for that," she said impatiently, pushing herself out of the armchair and grabbing her phone off the table. She dropped into the open spot beside him on the couch and pulled her legs up, folding them beneath her and propping her arms against her knees.

His brows lifted—she was staring down at her phone with a hyper-focused expression. "What are you doing?"

"Pulling up my event planning app."

"We're going to plan an event?"

" _No,_ we're going to plan our approach to helping Bonnie, obviously." She typed a few more things before glancing up with a sharp, expectant expression. "Step one?"

He blinked under the sudden scrutiny. "I mean, it depends on what she wakes up like tomorrow."

Her brows arched. "Don't you already know that? I mean, haven't you been through this like a bunch of times?"

He noticed her voice had taken on a bit of an edge and his brow furrowed. "I wouldn't say a bunch, but—"

"More than me, obviously," she replied, shoulders lifting into a sharp shrug, and his eyes thinned—something was off here.

"Are you okay?"

She frowned. "Of course I'm okay."

"You just seem a little…"

Her blows flew up. "What?"

He stared at her, brows raised, trying to figure out what was happening, and she stared back with an impatient look. "Never mind," he said after a beat, not wanting to escalate whatever it was that was going on with her, "sorry, I'm just tired."

"It's fine." She dropped her gaze back down to her phone, lips pursing. "So, step one?"

"Right, step one, uh…" he reached up to scratch his jaw. "I'd stay step one is just getting a read on her headspace tomorrow morning. Sometimes she's withdrawn, sometimes she's not—I mean, there've been times where she's woken up so normal that you wouldn't even know anything happened. It's hard to predict."

"I bet," she replied as she tapped something into her phone, and the edge was right back in her voice. His lips pressed together in a bemused line. "Step two?" she prompted, glancing up again, and he blinked.

"Uh… well, I mean, if she's acting normal, I'd say follow her lead. Find a quiet chance to ask her if she's okay. Make it clear you're there if she needs you without putting too much weight on it, since that could freak her out, you know?"

Her lips took on a mirthless flick as she typed that in. "Not really." She flipped her hair over her shoulder before he could reply and gave him another expectant look. "And what if she isn't acting normal?"

He heaved a tired sigh. "That's where it gets tough, honestly. It's just… really hard to know what she needs. I've had some success with trying to distract her till she snaps out of it, but sometimes I've just had to keep an eye on her and wait it out." He glanced up at her. "What about you, any ideas?"

She shrugged, stare glued to the screen as she typed. "Not really."

He arched a brow. "You sure?"

"I mean, you're the expert."

His face furrowed at the comment. "Wouldn't say that."

"Well, Stefan, compared to me you are, so," she said, tightening her jaw slightly, "let's go with advice of the person she trusted enough to let in." For a second he just stared at her profile. She stubbornly avoided his gaze, eyes trained on her blinking screen, all intensity and indifference, but he could tell she was chewing the inside of her cheek.

So that's what this was about. She was upset she hadn't known about all this.

He let out a long sigh. "Caroline—"

"Was it during college?"

His brows lifted. "What?"

"The two years," she said, still avoiding his gaze, "the ones where she did all that stuff—was it while I knew her?" She swallowed a bit unevenly. "Was it while we lived together? Was it happening right in front of me and I'm just the most distracted friend in the history of—"

"Whoa, whoa, hey," he said as her voice began wavering, reaching a hand out to touch her knee, "literally none of that happened in college. This was years ago in the beginning of high school, _way_ before she knew you. All she ever talked about in college was how much fun she was having with you and Tyler and how much she loved you guys."

She pressed her lips together and gave a tight nod, clearly trying to keep her face neutral, and he couldn't help his persistent feeling of surprise at how affected she was by all of this. It was just… not what he'd expected from her. Like obviously he knew she was one of Bonnie's best friends, so naturally she'd get upset about Bonnie being in turmoil, but the look on her face since Bonnie had left the room—it was like she literally couldn't breathe till everything was okay.

Honestly, it gave him a better understanding of why she was so reluctant to let people get close. Empathy like that for the wrong person… he could only imagine the number of ways it could backfire, the number of ways it already _had_ backfired, given what little he knew about her history. His jaw tightened a bit at the thought, and for a second he was right back in their dark hallway, trying to get her to calm down as she sobbed uncontrollably.

"Do you know what happened?"

The question pulled him out of the memory, and he glanced over to find Caroline staring at him, eyes a little red.

"When she started spiraling, I mean. Did something happen to trigger it or did it just, you know." She cleared her throat. "Happen on its own." He nodded slowly, taking a second to try to put together the best answer, and she seemed to take the pause as hesitation. "You don't have to tell me if I'm not supposed to know."

His brow furrowed and he shook his head. "No, it's fine. It was her mom, Abby." She stared at him and he brought a hand up to rub the back of his neck. "She showed up out of nowhere the summer before freshman year and kind of flipped Bonnie's whole world upside down."

She winced. "Was she awful?"

"No, just the opposite, actually," he said, dropping his hand. "She was really cool. Funny and warm and… well, a lot like Bonnie, really. And Bonnie, I mean," he shoulders lifted into a resigned shrug, "she idolized her. Like you could legitimately see the stars in her eyes when she looked at her or talked to her—it was like a fairytale come true. For the first time in her life, she had a real family."

Caroline bit her lip, clearly anticipating where the story was headed. "And then?"

Stefan sighed. "Well, things were great for about three months, and then they started getting tense, and then one day, right before school started, Abby just…" his shoulders lifted. "She was gone. Just up and left. Didn't even wait to say goodbye, just took off while we were at a pool party and left some bullshit note about it being better that way."

Caroline slowly began shaking her head.

"And the worst part is, Bonnie had actually been pretty okay before she showed up," he continued. "Like obviously not completely immune to the abandonment, but part of her almost seemed to take comfort in the fact that her mom never really knew her. It meant that it wasn't her fault, you know? She could convince herself that if Abby ever met her and saw what she'd left behind, she'd regret it so much and never leave ever again." His lips pressed into a hard line. "So, when she _did_ leave again, I mean, it just… Bonnie flipped. Cut me out of her life, got mixed into some shady stuff, ran with a bad crowd—it was rough."

"I hate this woman," Caroline murmured, and he scoffed.

"Tell me about it."

"How could you—like _how_ could someone find out their daughter is Bonnie and not—"

"I don't know," he muttered, shaking his head. "Like I'm pretty sure my family loves Bonnie more than they love me."

She threw a hand up. "My mom, too! And my brother, but ugh," she grimaced, waving a disgusted hand, "that's different and gross. God, I just can't—"

"You have a brother?"

He couldn't help the flare of curiosity. It had nothing to do with what they were talking about, and it was a marked change in tone, but he'd just realized he didn't know anything about her home life. He didn't know why, but it felt odd. Like something he should've known.

"Unfortunately," she muttered, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear, and his mouth flickered.

"That close, huh?"

She rolled her eyes, gaze still a little watery. "He's eighteen and hitting on everything with a pulse—I literally can't bring friends home for the holidays because of him."

His eyes fell into a humorous wince. "Eighteen's a tough age."

She scoffed. "Something tells me you weren't _quite_ as big of a horn dog as Kol is."

"See, I don't know about that," he said, sucking air through his teeth. "I was pretty bad."

She snorted. "Okay."

"Seriously, ask Bonnie—senior year of high school? I got around."

She arched a brow. "Class skank, huh?"

"Totally." She lapsed into a chuckle, and it was the first time since the end of the Never Have I Ever game that she'd seemed remotely relaxed in her own skin. He felt a strong urge to keep it going. "I don't know why you're laughing."

"I'm just," she waved an amused hand, "having a hard time imagining you sexing up a bunch of high school classrooms."

"Well, obviously—I was more of a bleachers guy."

"Oh, obviously."

"Bleachers and janitor's closets."

"Those were always locked in my school."

"I meeeean, mine too, but when you were a badass like I was, you knew how to pick them."

"Naturally."

"Tricks of the class skank trade."

"I'll have to look those up one day."

"You should, there's a book."

She pursed her lips, holding his gaze with a glinting one of her own, and it was precisely in that moment that he realized they'd been moving unconsciously closer to each other for the past few seconds. She'd twisted around toward the center of the couch, legs now tucked behind her and torso sloping in toward him. He'd draped an arm along the sofaback and was leaning into it, fingers centimeters from her shoulder—a brief flick of his fingers and he could twine them around a lock of her hair.

The warmth of her was emanating against him. The room was cold, but he could tell she ran hot—her knee was brushed up against the knuckles of his free hand and it was buzzing with heat. He felt his throat tighten slightly as he adjusted to the new awareness of her proximity, to the slowly building tension that came along with it. He didn't know where they stood. He didn't know what the rules of this thing they were doing was. He didn't even know if it was still happening—she'd seemed pretty eager to pull away from him in the basement earlier. He just knew that in that moment, he wanted to rake the knuckles touching her knee down the curve of her calf. Slip the hand near her shoulder into her hair and let the gold strands slide through his fingers. See what that warm skin felt like against his, if he could make it run a few degrees hotter.

And if a few more seconds had passed, he might've actually acted on some of those impulses, but fortunately, she cleared her throat and straightened up a bit before he could. He immediately swallowed the thickness in his throat and dropped his gaze, pulling himself back to create some distance.

"I think I'm going to try and get some sleep," she said, voice a bit tentative, and he nodded.

"Right, yeah, that's—" he lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, "—that's probably a good idea." She scooted back to the other end of the couch and began to settle in, grabbing a throw that'd fallen to the ground and pulling it over herself, and he frowned, lifting a puzzled thumb over his shoulder. "Aren't you going to sleep in your bed?"

"Your turn tonight," she replied, turning over onto her side and pulling her knees up, and his brow furrowed in disbelief.

"Don't be ridiculous, you slept in a bathtub last night."

"So did you."

"Well, yeah, but—"

"Stefan, it's fine, really," she said, turning face-up to stare at him. "I kind of just want to be out here tonight, anyway. You know." She shrugged. "In case anything happens."

He held her gaze for a bemused second before lapsing into a scoff. "Caroline, I'm not going to take your bed while you sleep out here, like I _can't_."

"I mean, do what you want, but I'm staying out here tonight."

"Well, I am, too."

"Fine."

"Okay."

She shrugged. "Great."

"Cool."

Her brow slid up as she stared up at him, and for a second, he didn't really know what to do. Was he supposed to sleep on the couch with her? He'd technically slept with her the night before in the bathtub. Plus, he was already sitting there. But given their… whatever, maybe that was too much? Was he supposed to take the armchair? Maybe he'd take the armchair. Actually, yeah, he was definitely going to take the armchair.

"Are you seriously moving to the armchair?" she drawled as he made to get up, body angled toward it, and he slowed his movements, turning to look at her.

"I just figured…" he waved a hand between them, and when she merely blinked at him, he cleared his throat. "I thought you'd be more comfortable. You know, if you had the couch to yourself."

"Stefan," she said, giving him a vaguely amused look, "you're like six feet tall. I'm 5'8. If you're going to sleep out here, you're sleeping on the couch."

He slowly sunk back into his seat, still a bit puzzled. "So like… with you, or—"

"I mean, I have no intention of moving, so if you can stomach it, then yes," she said, a subtle layer of mockery in her voice. "With me."

The teasing quality in her voice eased some of his hesitation, and his lips quirked a bit as he pushed himself to the other end of the couch. "I mean, it's asking a lot after having to sleep with you last night, but," he shrugged as he swung his legs up, setting them down along the outside edge and taking care to give her as much space as he could, "I think I'll be able to manage."

"A true hero."

He smiled at the droll response, settling his head back against the cushions and swinging his stare up to the ceiling. He tried not to focus on the warmth of her next to him and largely failed. Luckily, it felt a little bit different this time. Slightly less electric. More lulling. A minute or so of silence past—not strictly speaking comfortable, but slowly easing in that direction—before she broke it.

"Were you really the class skank in high school?"

His lips twitched at the question. "What do you think?"

"I think you probably had a steady girlfriend named Becky who you took out for milkshakes."

He scoffed. "What? Not even close."

"Really?"

"Yeah, her name was Valerie and we were ice cream people."

He heard her snort from the other end of the couch and it made his smile widen a bit. Another brief silence fell over them, humming and warm, and this time he broke it.

"Did you know about Damon?" His voice was a bit more serious, and he felt her shift beside him. "The whole foster care thing, I mean?"

"No," she said after a beat. "We don't really talk much about that kind of stuff."

"Kind of seems like he's had a tough life."

"Yeah."

He felt his brows draw a bit over his eyes. It bothered him to think that Damon had had a hard time growing up, that all that frothy charm was just surface-level masquerading. He didn't deserve that. Damon seemed like a good guy. Outrageous and boundary-less and guaranteed to land you in jail? Sure, but ultimately, a good guy.

Truth be told, when Stefan had first realized they were all stuck together, he'd figured Damon would just be another wildcard to try and keep in check, but he had to say, he'd actually really enjoyed having him around these past few days. Could've done without the whole drigh thing, maybe, but hey, they got memories and a handshake out of it, so why not.

"Honestly, I don't even know his last name," Caroline offered after a few seconds, and Stefan's brows slid up.

"Really?"

"Yeah—I realized that today when he went off on Bonnie. No idea."

His lips quirked. "I bet it's something fancy."

"Damon von Luxemburg."

"That's totally it," he said, shaking his head, "like there's no doubt in my mind that that's it."

He heard her chuckle a bit, though after a few seconds, the sound slipped into something slightly more serious. "Hey," she ventured a bit hesitantly, "about Damon going in on Bonnie like that. He said something that reminded me of that time I kind off went off on you in my closet. I don't really know if you remember—"

"The 'Yous' speech," he provided a bit dryly, though to his surprise, she didn't follow it up with a playful remark.

"I'm sorry about that. It was… presumptuous and uncalled for, and watching Damon do it to Bonnie tonight really drove that home. It was out of line."

Stefan nodded slowly. "But," he sighed after a moment, "like Damon's read tonight, not entirely inaccurate."

"What?" she said, surprise threaded into her voice. "It wasn't accurate."

"I don't know," he replied with a chuckle, though his voice was sincere, "I think I can be a little you-y. I get pretty caught up in the way I see the world sometimes."

She was quiet for a second. "You're not a 'you', Stefan."

Something about the way she said it made his blood buzz a bit. He debated presenting another argument, another example of his you-ness, but after a few seconds, he decided against it, settling for a simple, "Thanks, Caroline."

Another silence fell over them, this one a bit heavier with finality. He mulled over their conversation, over the abundance of sides to her that he'd never really picked up on before, over Bonnie and Damon and what the hell they were all going to be in for tomorrow, and after a long, pensive stretch, he actually felt himself starting to become drowsy. It wasn't completely hard to believe, given how long of a day it'd been, but still—it was strange to think that he was once again slipping off into the lull of sleep next to none other than the prickly ice queen herself, Caroline Forbes.

And once again, there was nothing prickly or icy about it.

Once again, he just felt humming and warm.

* * *

Bonnie shot up in her bed in a rush of panic.

Her breathing was shallow. Her heart was racing. The room was dark around her, wrapped up in the thick blanket of night, and her veins were still buzzing with alcohol. She pressed a shaky hand to her forehead, eyes fluttering briefly closed.

She saw flickers of her dream. Police sirens. Distorted faces. Loud voices, angry voices. Klaus screaming at her to get back in the car. Enzo's head lolling to the side as his tongue went slack from whatever he'd just shot up. A gun in her hand that she didn't know what to do with. A stranger's sticky hands on her thighs. It was always the same dark, unnerving mosaic of memories, blending and inverting into each other like she was watching them through a funhouse mirror, and she shook her head to clear them, snapping her eyes back open.

Her throat was dry.

She needed water.

She glanced at the clock on her bookshelf and saw that it was just after three A.M., though her eyes promptly caught on the shadowed figure asleep in her armchair. Her face sunk into a glower—oh, great. Her unsolicited babysitter for the night was still there. Perfect.

She sighed as she tossed the covers off herself, taking care to slip out of her bed as quietly as she could. Her steps were feather-light en route to the door, pure dancer's feet against the creaky wooden floor, and for a few seconds, she thought she was home free. In fact, it wasn't until she was reaching for the doorknob that she felt an unexpected arm snake around her waist. "Easy there, cowgirl."

His voice was a gruff murmur against her ear, thick with sleep, and her vexed stare immediately flew ceiling-ward. "I was hoping you'd died in your sleep."

"And miss out on these little moments of ours?" He clucked his tongue as she eased around to face him, lifting his hand up to prop it against the door behind her. His eyes were a dark, sleepy blue in the inky air, hair a rumpled mess atop his head, but even half-asleep, he managed to have a glitter about him. "Never."

"I'm just getting water."

"Sure, you are."

"Damon."

"Witchy."

Her jaw clenched a bit, aware of the fact that his hand was holding the door shut behind her so she couldn't open it. "This is my apartment."

He glanced around the room in mock-appraisal. "It's nice."

"And as such," she continued, ignoring the blithe remark, "I can leave my room to go get water whenever the fuck I want."

He sighed, dropping his head a bit. "Yeah, but see, the thing is—"

Her elbow flew out to try and shove his arm off the door and he dodged it, catching her wrist with his other hand. His brows lifted as he held her arm between them.

"You really need to stop assaulting me."

"You really need to stop holding me hostage," she countered, pulling her arm out of his grip, and he rolled his eyes.

"My crime's for a good cause, _heeellooo_."

"Keeping me from getting water is a good cause?"

"More like keeping you from doing whatever you're actually going to do."

She crossed her arms, leaning back against the door in mock-curiosity. "And what's that, Damon? Hmm? What, am I going to cook up some meth? Stab some neighbors? Light the apartment on fire? Oh, wait." Her brow furrowed. "You already did that one. _And_ you set off fireworks in the living room. _And_ you sliced your hand open. _And_ you got Stefan so high he disappeared into a blizzard. And yet," her shoulders lifted in a light, bitter little shrug, "no one locked you into a room, did they?"

"Door's not locked, sweetheart."

"Name's not sweetheart, buddy."

"Well, it's not Destructive Drunken Shit-Starter either, but that doesn't make it any less accurate, does it?" He shot her a pleasant little smile that prompted her to ease off the door and take a slow step closer to him.

She was the destructive one? This dude was 'bout to learn.

"You know what's funny?"

His gaze briefly flickered down her combative face. "I'm sure you're going to tell me."

"What's funny," she persisted in a drawl, easing closer still, "is that you're standing here acting like some kind of bodyguard, like the way I'm acting right now is so concerning that everyone needs to be in DEFCON 1, and yet I'm not doing a single thing you don't do on a regular day. I mean," she scoffed, "I'm basically a mirror to you right now. How do you like your reflection?"

He eyed her closely, as if trying to discern where she was going with this. "It's a little shorter than I remember."

"Mm, right, humor," she replied, bored. "That's your thing, right? Deflecting with a pointless comment?"

"Pointless seems harsh."

"Here's the thing, Damon," she continued, lifting a hand to pat his chest, "I'm going to wake up tomorrow and yeah, maybe regret a few things. I'll probably want to burrow into a hole and die for a bit. I might even smack myself for some of the shit I said, but _ultimately_ ," she dropped her stare down his face before bringing it back up in a sharp flick, and suddenly it was void of any lightness. "I'll snap back into being myself. Hopeful. Strong. Giving a shit about life. Giving enough of a shit to _try_. But _you_?" She shook her head, lifting her hand to wave it at herself, at her drunken state. "This is you everyday. This is what you choose to be, _every_ single day. Drunk. Cynical. Indulgent. _Pointless._ "

His lips twitched humorlessly at the revisited word.

"So if you don't like it," she murmured, taking a final, looming step and bringing her face right up to his, "maybe you should start worrying more about yourself. Because unlike you…" she pressed her lips together and gave him a frank once-over. "This is just a night for me."

For a second, he just stared at her. She stared right back—she meant that shit. He could laugh it off or he could listen, she really didn't care, but she wasn't about to stand there and act like him policing her given everything he chose to be wasn't ridiculous. After a long beat, he glanced away. "Thanks for the tip."

His voice was dismissive, but she noticed the tic in his jaw.

Whatever, dude.

Let him live his dumb life.

What did she care.

She turned around and reached for the doorknob, but when she pulled it toward her, the hand he had against the door didn't budge. Her teeth clenched. "Damon."

At his lack of response, she veered around to stare at him. His expression was obstinate and vaguely tired. "If you want water, I can get it for you."

Her face lit up with mock-appall. "And leave me all by myself in this big, dangerous room?"

"I mean, it's either that or I follow you to the kitchen, but something tells me you'd like that even less."

"Probably the fact that it's controlling and infantilizing."

His tired eyes flashed ceiling-ward. "Kid, I'm just trying to keep you alive, alright?"

Was he for real? "'Cause I can't do that myself?"

"Well, you're in a headspace where you think freezing to death is an A+ plan so at the moment, I'm thinking no."

"Well, I'm thinking—"

"Bonnie," he sighed, exasperated, and something about the note of actual sincerity in his voice quelled her response, "I know you're mad at the world right now, and I know you didn't deserve the shit your parents put you through, and believe it or not, I know how much it fucking hurts to be let down." He scoffed slightly, waving a hand. "It's actually kind of the story of my life. But you have two best friends sitting in the living room right now who clearly love the shit out of you, worried as fucking hell, and for some reason, I promised them I'd get you through the night unscathed. Right now, I'm really trying not to let _them_ down, so if not for your sake, if not for my sake, then maybe for _their_ sake, can you please take it down a notch?"

He was staring at her with a frank look, face void of its usual glitter, and she pressed her lips together. Okay. Bringing up Stefan and Caroline was a decently smart move. She'd already been feeling the beginnings of guilt trying to worm their way in over what she'd said to them earlier, and she took a deep breath to try and squash it down. "Fine."

His brows ticked up a fraction. "Fine?"

"I'll go back to bed and sleep it off." His tension eased a bit. "Right after you let me go get a glass of water."

He threw his head back into a groan. "Bonnie."

"I'm not going anywhere but the kitchen, bro, just let me live."

He kept his head lolled back for a few seconds before sighing and bringing it up. "Two minutes."

"Five."

"Any longer than two and I'll come after you."

"You're supposed to compromise with three, hello?" He held up two fingers in resolute response and she rolled her eyes. "Whatever."

She turned around and pulled the doorknob, and miraculously, the door finally opened. "Two minutes," he echoed behind her as she slipped out of the room, and she threw a sarcastic thumbs up over her shoulder.

"Got it, Hitler."

* * *

Caroline couldn't sleep.

She wasn't sure how long it'd been since they'd tried to go to sleep—maybe half an hour, maybe more—but she couldn't seem to stop shifting around on the couch. It was subtle at first—a slight nudge of her body one way, a small twist in the other—but pretty soon it'd progressed into full-fledged fidgeting. She was restless. She couldn't help it: her brain was going at a mile a minute as it tried to parse through everything that had gone down earlier, and her body seemed to be trying to keep up.

And, you know, it didn't super help that she had a guy who did weird things to her better judgment pressed alongside her, sleeping at the other end of the couch. Granted, that was misleading. Stefan's warm frame had actually been more comforting than anything, and back when she'd actually started nodding off for a bit earlier, she was glad he was there. Unfortunately, the slumber never actually took, and here she was, however longer later, wide-awake.

She thought she was alone in that, until: "Can't sleep either?"

She let out a loud, gusty sigh at the sound of his voice, dropping her hands against the blankets in a huff. "I should be completely exhausted right now but instead I'm just wired."

"Same."

She reached up to push her hair out her face, holding her palm against her forehead. "Are you thinking about Bonnie?"

"Yep."

"Me, too," she sighed. "Like I can't turn it off."

"You know what we need?"

She snorted. "Therapy?"

"Culinary therapy."

Her brow furrowed as she felt him sit up on the other end of the couch, prompting her to push herself onto her elbows. "What?"

He shrugged as he swung his feet down to the floor, blankets sliding off of him. "I make killer hot cocoa."

She blinked. "You want to make hot cocoa _now_? It's like 3 AM."

"That's the best time."

"I don't eat processed sugar past 8 o'clock."

"You're not going to eat it, you're going to drink it."

"Stefan—"

He got to his feet and set off toward the kitchen before she could protest, and she merely stared at his retreating frame. "Get up," he called as he disappeared from view, voice a bit muffled, and she scoffed, lips twitching against a smile.

"I'm not going to have any."

"Fine, then come help me make it."

"I don't even know the recipe."

"Learning it'll distract you."

She sighed, scrunching her nose as she considered this. She did need a distraction. And thus, approximately ten minutes later, she found herself hovering over a cutting board with a furrowed brow, slicing up jumbo marshmallows into the closest she could get to mini marshmallows. Her blood was still buzzing with residual champagne, movements loose and careless with the knife, and after a few seconds, she heard a derisive snort behind her.

"That's not how you cut."

She scoffed, casting a narrowed gaze over her shoulder. "What's wrong with how I cut?"

"Well, for starters, you should alwa—" he surged forward and grabbed her wrist, stopping the knife from descending, and she jumped at the suddenness of the movement, glancing down in surprise, "—cut _away_ from your hand."

The blade was hovering centimeters over her finger. Her expression saturated with annoyance, though her attention promptly shifted as his body slowly eased the rest of the way up behind hers, his free hand coming around to catch the one she'd almost sliced open.

"Observe," he said, his voice a smug rumble against her ear, and his hands began guiding hers into what she assumed was the 'correct' way to cut something, coaxing the knife into slow, controlled strokes away from any fingers. A quiet headiness began settling over her, spurred by the friction of his leanly muscled arms ghosting against hers, and forced herself to ignore it.

"I like my way better," she said with a blunt shrug, attempting to diffuse the budding tension charging the air, but all it ended up doing was dragging her shoulders against his chest. Great.

"So you like your cocoa with a side of severed finger?"

Her attention drifted for a second, fixing on the shadowed texture of his hands, the way they completely dwarfed hers. "Maybe I just like a little danger," she countered thoughtlessly, distracted. She couldn't help it—her vision was flickering with memories of those same hands hoisting her up against the bathroom wall, coasting up her stomach, tangled in fistfuls of her hair…

"Maybe we both do."

The silky murmur was enough to put a crack in her daze. Her stare slowly veered around to meet his moonlit profile. And then she pressed her lips together. And then she burst into a badly concealed snort.

His drawn expression broke. "What?"

It bloomed into an all out laugh, knife clattering on the cutting board as she pressed a hand against her mouth.

" _What_?" She shook her head, unable to stop laughing, and his own mouth began flickering with amusement. "You don't think I can be dangerous?"

"N-no, of course you can," she managed to get out, swallowing a laugh as she turned to face him fully. She cleared her throat and forced her expression into a serious look, gesturing at his frame. "Danger Zone Stefan over he—" another burst of laughter erupted out of her before she could finish— _the guy had passed out at an aquarium—_ and he stared at her in mock-offense, eyes bright with humor.

"I _am_ Danger Zone Stefan."

"You're so not," she managed between breaths, and he scoffed in indignation.

"I'm a _felon._ "

"No, you're not."

"Okay, no I'm not, but," his lips twitched at her eyes literally began tearing up, "I did resist arrest."

"R-really?"

"Absolutely! Kind of. I mean, I frowned a _lot_."

The mental image of him scowling all rebel-like in the back of a police car made her laugh even harder, and pretty soon he'd lapsed into his own chuckle, a deep, easy rumble of a sound that she wasn't sure she'd really ever heard before—or at the very least, she'd never heard it in a duet with hers. It was an oddly pleasant combination, and after a few moments, it petered off and they merely stood there, lit in a mirthy afterglow.

"Danger Zone Stefan."

"In the flesh."

"Prove it."

He scoffed. "I can't just summon my epic dangerousness on command."

She reached a hand back to feel around for the knife and blindly swiped it up by the blade. "You have a knife and witness: go."

He stared at it for a few seconds, pressing his lips together.

"What?"

"Really not how you hold a knife."

"Oh, my _God._ "

"Can I just—" he reached up and repositioned it in her hand, rotating it so that her fingers were around the handle and the blade was pointing to the floor. She merely stared at him, exasperated and the slightest, strangest bit endeared.

"Really not helping your case here, Danger Zone."

"Please," he scoffed, playful stare flicking back up to hers, "knives are so pedestrian—I'm lawyer dangerous."

" _Lawyer dangerous_?" she echoed, brows lifting in amusement.

"Yep."

"What the hell is that?"

"Classified."

"Does that mean made up?"

"No, it means I'd tell you, but…"

"…then you'd have to hire someone actually dangerous to kill me?"

"Exactly _._ "

She laughed again despite herself, distantly aware of how strange it was to feel this comfortable around him. It'd been that way all night. The air between them felt easy, light—there was still a flicker of friction, but it was different. Playful. Nothing like the stilted energy it usually was. "What's lawyer dangerous?" she pressed, setting the knife down on the counter behind her, and his shoulders eased into a cheeky shrug.

"It's—"

"Besides imaginary."

"—being able to get people to do what you want without them realizing it."

She lifted a slow, amused brow. "Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Mind-control."

"Yep."

"That's what you're going with."

"Mmm-hmm."

She stared at him for a second, trying to decide if he actually believed that or if it was just more of the Stefan trollery she was starting to get used to. "Fine—get me to do something."

He rolled his eyes. "Now you're expecting it."

"And a jury isn't?" she countered. "Besides, would that really stop Danger Zone Stefan?"

His expression immediately sobered. "Nothing stops Danger Zone Stefan."

"Then—"

"Except hot cocoa burning."

Her lips pursed in a mixture of amusement and skepticism as he backed away, lifting his shoulders into a 'what can you do?' shrug before whirling around and heading to the stove. "Lame."

"You sure you don't want some?" he asked as he turned the burner off, plucking a ladle from their mason jar of utensils and blithely ignoring her jab.

"Absolutely."

"Your loss." He spooned the cocoa he'd been cooking up into a mug and brought it up for a quick taste, swiveling around to lean against the stove. His brow promptly furrowed. He shot the steaming cup a scrutinizing look.

"No good?"

"Mm, just missing something."

She cast a vague gaze around the kitchen before spotting the bag of jumbo marshmallows she'd been cutting up. "Marshmallows?" she ventured, picking the bag up and giving it a lazy waggle.

He pursed his lips. "Maybe." After a second, he held the mug out to her and turned back to the stove, reaching up with his free hand to open the cabinet. "Can you throw some in?"

"Sure," she said, easing herself off the counter and taking the mug from him, and he immediately flipped into full-on chef mode, grabbing everything from vanilla extract to red chili powder off the shelf. She arched a brow but didn't comment, returning to the counter and tossing a handful of chopped up marshmallows into the cocoa.

"Here," she said, holding the mug out, and he didn't even glance at her.

"Just let me mess with this for a second."

She couldn't help but snort at how into it he was—it looked like he was in the middle of a friggin' final, not mixing cocoa powder and sugar into milk. A solid two minutes went by where all he did was throw in a dash of cinnamon and taste the result about 84 times, and by the 85th taste, she couldn't hold back her impatience. "Really."

"It's not there yet."

"Yes, it is."

He scoffed at her conviction. "You haven't even tried it."

She brought the mug up and took an impatient sip. "Award-winning." He sighed, returning his gaze to the pot, and her stare veered ceiling-ward. "Stefan, it's hot chocolate, not brain surgery."

"It's _almost_ hot chocolate."

"It's hot and it's chocolate, what more do you want?" she replied, though after a second, the full effect of all the flavors processed in her head. She glanced down at the mug with a frown. "Also, it's actually really good."

He shot her an amused look. "Not transparent at all."

"No, I'm serious," she said, bringing the mug up and taking a less distracted sip—it was thick and creamy and just a touch spicy, the raw cocoa oaky on her tongue. Her pleasantly surprised gaze slowly flickered up to his—he'd made this from scratch? "Not bad, Danger Zone."

"Still missing something," he muttered in response, puzzling over the steaming pot, and she rolled her eyes.

"You need hobbies."

"Says the girl who included margins of error in the graphs she made for our shower schedules."

"Um, that's actually important."

"How is that important?"

"Because if you've ever met Bonnie Bennett, you know schedules and organization aren't exactly her thing," she said, taking another sip from her mug. "I had to account for her messing it up."

"Or the world would end."

She gave a haughty lift of her chin. "Yes."

"Got it." His lips quirked as he stirred the pot, and she felt her own curl as she eased back against the counter, taking another absent sip of her cocoa. "Don't you find it funny how Bonnie's such a wreck and yet she still—"

"—totally kicks ass at medicine?"

" _Yes_."

"It makes no sense."

"None."

"Like I'd trust her to give me brain surgery over sending a bill in on time."

She waved a hand, swallowing another mouthful of cocoa. "I set all her online banking to auto-payments, so she's covered for now."

"Probably single-handedly saved her credit score."

She shrugged. "She's going to give me free Botox when I'm 60, so it works out."

"Does she know that?"

"She will."

He chuckled as he set the ladle down and lifted the saucepan off the stove, pouring the remaining cocoa into a mug. Her brows flew up in surprise. "Finally done?"

"Finally done."

"What was it missing?"

He shrugged as he set the pot in the sink, flipping the faucet on to soak the iron. "Nothing."

She blinked at him. "Seriously?"

"Yep."

"After all that?"

"Mmm-hmm."

She gave a bewildered snort, tossing back the final dredges of cocoa from her mug. "You've got a hell of an imagination, buddy."

"Do I?" He switched the faucet off and swiped up his mug, walking back up to her with a curious expression, and she arched a brow.

"Phantom missing ingredients, fake mind control abilities…"

"Mmm." He nodded as he took a sip from his mug, pensive stare flitting down to her cup. "You all done with the cocoa you had no intention of drinking?" Her brow furrowed, gaze dropping to the empty mug in her hand. And then, after a few puzzled seconds, it hit her.

He'd gotten her to drink it.

She'd said she didn't want any and yet somehow, five minutes later, she'd downed the entire thing. Her gaze slowly lifted back up to his—it was a sly, glinting green—and tapered a bit in realization. That _little_ — "There was no missing ingredient, was there?"

He pretended to wince. "'Fraid not."

"And you knew I'd try it if you kept saying there was."

He began easing closer. "'Fraid so."

"And you knew I'd drink it all once I tried it."

"Pretty much."

She merely stared at him as he slowed to a halt less than a foot away, disheveled hair catching the moonlight in a cool wash of blue. He'd totally played her. Saint Stefan had played her. She hadn't even—

"Lawyer dangerous," he sing-songed in light, pleasant summary.

For a few seconds, all she did was blink at him. She hated being manipulated. Pointblank. She hated feeling like she wasn't in control of her own decisions. She hated doing what other people wanted, and yet in that moment, she found cocoa-making, knife-safety obsessed, Piss Pants Salvatore really hot. Like wake the neighbors hot. Table sex hot.

Her defenses lifted instinctively—which meant that it was happening again. The false sense of security, the lull of feeling weirdly safe about things she normally shut down immediately—it was happening again with him and it was making her skin charge with nerves. Manipulation wasn't fucking sexy, it was a giant, blaring red flag, so why was it registering as harmless right now, like the worst thing he'd ever use it for was getting a killer whale out of Sea World?

She didn't know that.

She didn't know him.

But part of her was starting to feel like she did, and that, more than anything, was unnerving the hell out of her, because it meant her emotions were starting to work against her logic. That was how bad things happened. That was how bad people happened.

"What, no scathing comment?" he ventured playfully after a few seconds, snapping her out of her temporary freeze, and she cleared her throat, whirling around to busy herself with cleaning up the marshmallows.

"You're still lame."

"There she is."

She swallowed the tightness in her throat, tossing the unused marshmallows back into the bag a little stiffly, and he seemed to notice something was off with her because he switched gears, turning the conversation back to her.

"So, what kind of dangerous is Caroline Forbes?"

She scoffed, rolling the top of the bag closed. "You're the one that invented the categories."

"Oh, come on," he drawled, "you must have _some_ idea of—"

"I don't," she bit out, tone sharper than she'd meant it to be, and he fell silent for a second—she could practically see his broody brow furrowing behind her. The second passed, however, and he slipped back into his easy tenor.

"Well, I have a few theories."

Despite her edgy state, she couldn't help the flicker of curiosity that shot through her—they might've moved past being total strangers over the past few days, but she didn't actually know much about what he thought of her. Thus, against her better judgment, she found herself asking, "Like what?"

He took a thoughtful beat. "Well," he ventured, "considering you literally pulled one on me yesterday, you're definitely knife dangerous."

Her lips flickered upward despite themselves—she had done that. God, had that really been yesterday? It felt like ages ago. "You were blocking my coffee access."

"Pretty sure you were blocking your own coffee access."

"Pretty sure you're insane." She could sense his smirk behind her—the lopsided, glinty one that she hadn't even known existed before three days ago—and she shrugged it off, focusing on clipping the bag shut. "What else?"

"What else what?"

"You said theories, as in plural," she said, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from sounding overly curious, "so what other kinds of dangerous?"

He was silent for a beat, a plane of warmth behind her. She felt her movements slow a bit, shoulders unexpectedly tensing in anticipation of what he might say. And then: "Frankly, you're hot girl dangerous."

Her face immediately scrunched up, turning to shoot a ' _really_?' look over her shoulder, though an instinctive, buried part of her warmed at the implication. "Hot girl dangerous?"

"Hot girl dangerous," he repeated.

"What's hot girl dangerous?"

"I think you know what it is."

"I think I know it sounds pretty sexist."

His brow furrowed thoughtfully, considering this. "I'd say it definitely capitalizes on a sexist society."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning you, as a girl who's aware of her own sex appeal, can use said sex appeal to your advantage in a world that places an oppressive amount of value on female beauty."

She slid a considering gaze down his face. "And that's considered dangerous?"

He shrugged. "To some people, yeah."

"To you?"

He let out a low chuckle. "Uh, no. Three sisters and Bonnie as a best friend—very much an intersectional feminist." A vague flicker of surprise shot through her at the term, and the fact that he even knew it. Matt had gotten into a giant fight with her once after she'd called him a feminist in front of his friends. "That said, I, uh…" he dropped his stare to the floor for a second, lips quirking uncertainly, "doubt you'd have a particularly hard time getting me to do something for you, so… maybe a little dangerous."

Her pulse tripped instinctively at the unexpected comment. She felt her skin heat up—he looked… boyish, his wry gaze fixed to the floor, almost seeming unsure about why he'd even thrown that in. She tried to ignore the hum starting to buzz in her veins, the vague thrill of the idea of having some kind of influence over him, some kind of indication that she wasn't crazy, that there had been looks and touches and things that went beyond bored enemies with nothing better to do. The lure of curiosity won out.

"What if I wanted you to use the shaving cream with the ketones in it?"

His averted stare flickered with humor, easing the gathering layer of awkward tension from his frame. "Tough call, but…" his eyes swung up to hers, "I think you could manage it."

Her lips pursed, stare taking on a slight gleam that she knew it shouldn't. "What if…" she felt it taking over, a fluid, instinctive flirtiness, spurred by the effect it was having on him, by the effect his affectedness was having on her, "I wanted you to hold a knife incorrectly."

He held her gaze for a second before taking a step forward and easing up behind her, hand reaching past her waist to grab the knife she'd abandoned on the counter. She swiveled back around, glancing down—his fingers were holding it up by the blade, offering it up to her. Her lips curled upward, stubbornly ignoring the voice in her head telling her this was a bad idea.

"Anything else?" he asked, voice an amused drawl beside her ear, and she could feel the warmth radiating off his tall frame, subtly boxing her against the counter.

"Going to the top floor of an aquarium," she said after a beat, and he immediately lapsed into a groan behind her.

"Wow."

She couldn't help but laugh at the betrayal in his voice.

"That's just— _wow."_

"Would you do it?"

"I can't even believe you'd ask me that."

Her laughter veered into a grin as she glanced at him over her shoulder. "That's not an answer."

His face was all melodramatic disappointment. "I thought you were better than this."

She scrunched her nose. "Still not an answer."

"Would I revisit a place of severe childhood trauma in the name of pleasing a heartless, wildly insensitive sadist, is that the question?"

"Yep."

He shook his head in disbelief, prompting her smile to widen, and after a few seconds, his stare did the thing again. The one where it seemed to just… snag on her for a moment. Briefly. Unintentionally. A flare of distraction. She felt her pulse tick upward the slightest bit, warm under the fixedness of his grey-green gaze, and after a few humming seconds, his voice thickened slightly, sidetracked. "Would you be looking at me like that?"

Oh, no.

No, no. No, no, no.

 _Caroline_ , she chorused to herself, _no._ A world of no. A _solar system_ of no. Her blood was buzzing, stare fixed on his, caught in the way he was looking at her: the tensed jaw, the captive stare, like he'd just stumbled on some unexpectedly fascinating ruin and he couldn't look away and _no_ , she _knew_ that look. She knew it so well, the stupid fucking look she'd gotten so good at mercilessly rejecting at bars, at responding to with an eye roll and a 'check please', at scoffing at in every romantic movie because it was so hilariously fake, so impetuous, so empty, a fleeting flicker of fascination packaged as something revelatory and meaningful, as something with longevity, as love or something like it… and yet for some reason, in that moment, coming from him, this righteous, broody, tree-hugging know-it-all who was scared of heights, she couldn't quite bring herself to—

His mouth caught hers in a swift, sudden kiss, nailing her spiraling thoughts to a standstill. Her pulse tripped immediately at the friction of his lips, spiced with chocolate, thrilling yet familiar against hers, and the strength of her sudden nerves seemed to delay her reaction long enough to have him pull back after a few seconds. He cleared his throat. "I—" he shook his head rapidly to clear it, voice thick, "sorry, I—"

Her hand flew up to his collar to pull his mouth back onto hers, and he responded to the kiss immediately, hands dropping to her waist to swivel her around in a quick, hungry tug. Her back instantly hit the edge of the counter as his body pushed forward, pressing into hers, and a shot of adrenaline surged through her at the urgency of the contact, at the bite of his rigid frame against the pliant give of hers.

This was bad.

This was really bad.

And all she wanted to do was make it worse.

He shot a hand out and knocked the knife to the side, hoisting her up onto the countertop in a move so impatient it made her skin burn. His mouth was hot and demanding on hers, large hands roaming over her like they couldn't decide on a favorite spot, and her fingers immediately went for his shirt, legs wrapping around his waist to pull him.

She flew through the buttons and he hastily shrugged the denim off, his own hands slipping beneath the hem of her sweater and pushing it up her thighs to her stomach. She pulled it over her head and flung it to the floor, arms hungrily wrapping around his neck to pull his mouth back onto hers, and to her surprise, he scooped her up off the counter, flushing her newly exposed skin against his.

The heat was electrifying, pooling between her legs in a throbbing need as he maneuvered their twined frames toward the living room, but it was too far, way too far, and they ended up crashing against the kitchen table instead. She wasted no time in yanking him forward, dragging him back with her till he was forced to climb on, and it wasn't until his frame was fully on top of hers that she stopped pulling, redirecting her efforts instead to grinding into him.

He groaned against her lips at the contact. "Caroline—"

She took his lip between her teeth to cut him off, shivering at the straining stiffness rubbing against the lace of her underwear.

"Caroline, maybe—" his jaw clenched as she switched up the rhythm of her hips, her lips moving down the sharp line of his jaw, "—maybe we should… slow down and rethink—" his stare bloomed with a flare of adrenaline as her hand slid down to palm the swell of his sweatpants, her lips re-capturing his mouth, and much to her satisfaction, he lost himself again, slipping entirely back into the moment.

So much so, in fact, that by the time Bonnie wandered into the kitchen not five minutes later, he was halfway through coaxing off her underwear, kissing his way down the jut of her hipbone as the hand she'd buried in his hair urged him lower.

"Where the _fuck_ are all of our cups?"

Caroline's eyes flew open in horror at the growl of a voice as Stefan's head snapped up, hair a comical wreck atop his head.

The sound of a cabinet door being thrown closed made them both jolt, and Caroline watched as his wide gaze followed a furious Bonnie across the dark kitchen, body frozen beneath his. When the sound of a fridge door being ripped open echoed through the room, his stare dropped back to hers.

"She didn't notice," he mouthed, expression entirely bewildered, and Caroline's eyes flashed as she began shoving him off.

"Hurry!" she mouthed back, scrambling up into a sitting position and fixing her underwear as he hastily landed on his feet. Her hands immediately shot back to refasten the clasp of her bra, casting a wild gaze around the dark room for her sweater, and after a second, she spotted it on the floor behind his feet. "Sweater, _sweater_!" she hissed at him, snapping her fingers to get his attention, and he swung a rushed gaze around for a second before reaching down and tossing it to her. She yanked it on in a rough movement as he did up the drawstring of his sweatpants, frantically cataloguing if there was anything left to do, and after a second, their eyes landed on each other.

She winced. "Hair!" she mouthed, reaching up to mime straightening it out, and he lifted a blind hand up to try and tame it. She shook her head—Christ, he was making it worse—and shot a quick glance at Bonnie, whose small, angry, oblivious as _hell_ frame was still swallowed by the light of the fridge. "Come here," she whispered, waving him over as she crawled to the edge of the table, and within seconds she had his chin in her hand, free hand smoothing down the chaotic tufts of blonde-brown.

God, she'd really done a number on him.

She realized he was staring at her, and her sharp gaze snapped down to meet his. "What?" she hissed, countenance entirely on edge—Bonnie could turn around any second and see a suspiciously shirtless Stefan with hair in the midst of a fucking _sex_ _rebellion_. His lips merely quirked upward in response, eyes lit with a subtle glint of humor, and her expression flooded with irritation. "This isn't funny."

"It's a little funny," he murmured.

"Where the hell is your shirt?"

"Across the room."

" _Why is it across the room_?"

His brows had barely lifted into a 'really?' look when the sound of the fridge door closing snapped them apart.

"Where'd all of our cups go?" Bonnie whined, whirling around with a scowl, and Caroline cleared her throat.

"Er, why would they be in the fridge, exactly?"

Bonnie threw her hands up in the air. "Cause sometimes we keep them there, _Caroline_."

Caroline frowned. "Since when?"

"Since forever?"

"We've literally never kept cups in the fridge."

Bonnie scowled. "What are you, the cup patrol?"

"Check the cupboard above the sink," Caroline sighed, glancing at Stefan out of the corner of her eye, though when she caught the amused look he was giving her, her gaze snagged. " _What_?"

He shrugged. "What?"

"Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Stop," she hissed and his brow furrowed, though he still managed to look on the verge of laughter.

"I don't—"

" _Finally_ ," Bonnie groaned, swiping a glass from the cupboard where they always kept their glasses, and they both turned their attention back to her.

"Hey, uh…" Caroline ventured tentatively, tucking a loose strand behind her ear, "are you—I mean, how are you feeling?"

Bonnie shrugged, filling the glass with tap water before leaning against the counter. "I mean," she began, taking a sip from her glass and waving it around, "I'd be a lot better if you guys hadn't sicced Mommy Dearest on me."

Caroline frowned, glancing back at Stefan. Mommy Dearest?

"Oh, look, speak of the devil," Bonnie drawled, and they both turned around to see Damon leaning against the doorframe.

He clucked his tongue. "Tick-tock, Lemon Drop."

"Why does everything you say sound like it's coming from a pervy Willy Wonka?"

"Time for bed, Veruca Salt." His mouth tipped into a smirk. "You've been a very bad girl."

"This is what you guys stuck me with?" she directed at Stefan and Caroline, tipping her glass toward Damon, and he rolled his eyes.

"Come on, kid, we had a deal—two minutes is up, you have your water, let's go."

"I'm still drinking it."

"Shockingly, you can do that in your room."

She scoffed as he began walking into the kitchen. "What's the big deal? I'm here, you're here, they're here—I'm as supervised as I can friggin' be."

"Less people, less damage control needed."

"'Damage control'," she mocked, shooting Caroline a 'can you believe this dude' look as he grabbed hold of her wrist and began dragging her out of the kitchen. "Didn't realize I was some kind of celebrity. Where's TMZ? Where mah tabloids at? 'Breaking news! Med student no one's ever heard of gets drunk and sips water in kitchen! EVERYBODY FREAK OUT."

"I would just like to point out that I'm here by force," Damon said as they reached the doorway, wincing when she suddenly hopped onto his back and wrapped around him like a baby orangutan, "but you two actually _chose_ to befriend this." He shot Stefan and Caroline a flat look, struggling to balance the new weight distribution he was carrying, though after a second, his eyes promptly narrowed.

His movements stilled.

His expression grew suspicious.

He looked at Stefan.

He looked at Caroline.

And then he slowly slid his gaze over to the table.

Caroline's pulse spiked irrationally. No way. There was _no way_ he could put that together, not without having even see—

"Bleach," he demanded, snapping a finger up to point at the table. Her mouth fell open, moving in a bewildered attempt to form words, and he didn't even bother waiting for a response. "I eat there, amigos. Bleach that shit."

And with that, he turned around and waltzed out of the kitchen while Bonnie attempted to cornrow his hair. She watched them disappear down the dark hallway with a mortified look.

"How the hell did he—"

"I don't know," she murmured, still in shock. "Does he have a friggin' six sense for sex, like?"

"Honestly, if anyone would, it's him."

She pressed her lips together, stare still trained forward, vaguely aware of the fact that she was avoiding his. She was also vaguely aware of the fact that at least half of her current stress had nothing to do with Damon and everything to do with what had just happened. What she'd just let happen. Hell, what she'd just actively _made_ happen.

The silence stretched between them for a long, buzzing beat, and she felt the tension rising in the room. He cleared his throat. "Listen, Caroline—"

"We don't have to, you know," she snapped an awkward hand up to wave it in the air, still avoiding his gaze, "talk about anything, Stefan, it's fine."

"I mean," he began, voice warm with a hint of humor, "I know we don't have to, but it wouldn't be the worst thing to get an idea of where your head's at right now." She glanced at him and he shrugged. "Not always the easiest person to get a read on."

She returned it with a shrug of her own. "Nothing to read."

His brows ticked briefly. "Really."

"Yep."

"So the vibe I'm getting that this all ended up going a little too fast is—"

"Why would this have been too fast?" she interjected a little sharply, taking on a bit of a baffled look. "Too fast for what timeline?"

His brow furrowed. "No particular timeline, I just—"

"Because this," she waved a hand between them, "whatever it is, I mean, we both know the most it would ever be is casual sex, right? And that's assuming it even gets that far, which may not even happen because we're Bonnie's best friends and that could get messy later."

He merely stared at her, as if trying to figure her out.

"But for the sake of argument, assuming this does get fully realized, there aren't really any speed limits on a casual sex timeline, so circling back to my original question, why would this have been too fast?"

At his scrutinizing silence, she lifted her brows in an expectant look. He shook his head briefly, as if to snap out of his thoughts. "Uh, I don't know," he said vaguely. "You're right. It wouldn't have been too fast."

"Okay, so…" her lips lifted into a puzzled smile, casting a searching gaze around the room, "what's the problem?"

His shoulders lifted into an uncertain shrug. "Looks like there isn't a problem."

"Great."

His lips ticked up into a distant smile, and for a second they both just stood there, silent and a bit tense, racking up the awkwardness in the room. He broke it first. "Well, I'm going to try to actually sleep now." He walked over to where his shirt had landed and picked it up. "The fact that Bonnie's still drunk this late in means it's definitely going to be a busy morning."

"Sounds like a plan," she said thinly, chewing her lip. "Think I might actually try my bed this time, though."

He nodded as he shrugged his shirt back on, and she frowned suddenly.

"Though you're still totally welcome to it if you want it—I just meant if you still wanted the couch."

His lips quirked. "I'm good with the couch. Thanks."

"Are you sure?" she asked, shrugging a bit awkwardly. "That couch is tiny. I think you'd be a lot more comfortable in my bed." She promptly frowned again. "But not like—I mean instead of me."

"Caroline," he said, giving her a frank look, "bed's all yours."

She gave a quick nod. "Cool."

He finished up putting on his shirt, grabbed a glass of water, and then shot her a brief smile as he headed to the living room. "'Night."

"Goodnight," she said back, easing around to face away from his retreating form and settling back against the counter. She pressed a cool palm up to her hot face, blinking into the darkness.

'Good' didn't really seem like the right word for this night.

Not by a long shot.

But she'd be lying to herself if she didn't admit that 'bad', well…

It wasn't quite the right word for it either.

* * *

"Listen, all I'm saying is you could pull it off," Bonnie insisted as he walked her into the room, hands on her waist, guiding her from behind.

"You're not giving me a Mohawk."

" _Obbbbviously_ , I just—"

"Bedtime."

"Okay, but would you just consider—" she cursed as she stumbled over something on the dark floor, smacking her toe right into it. He tightened his grip on her waist.

"Let's go."

"I'm injured!"

"Bonnie."

She swiveled around in his arms to face him, face wildly dramatic, though her attention promptly shifted to his hair. She bit her lip, reaching a hand out. "If you would just let me shave the—"

 _"Move_ ," he drawled, resuming his forward movement and walking her backwards toward her bed, and she threw her head back in a groan.

"I'm not tired."

"Deal's a deal."

"Let's—" she stumbled blindly on something else, "let's change the terms!"

"Nope."

"No, hear me out," she said eagerly, digging her heels into the floor to stop their progress, "we change the terms of the agreement so that I can—" He swooped her up by the waist and pitched her over his shoulder, effectively rejecting the proposition. She sighed, propping her elbow up against his back and dropping her chin against it as he carried her the rest of the way over to her bed. "Fascist."

He reached the edge of her mattress and tried to drop her into it, but she twined her arms and legs around him in a fierce cling. " _Bonnie_." She let out a wicked giggle, burrowing her head into his shoulder and tightening her legs around his waist, and after an aggravated beat, he sighed. "Fine."

For a second, she thought he was actually going to renegotiate their deal, but instead he dropped to the mattress and began climbing onto it with her leech-like body still wrapped around him. She glanced around in surprise, tightening the arms she had hooked around his neck, and after a few seconds, he had her all the way up to the headboard.

He eased her down lightly, worn-in sheets sighing around her and the hair that'd come loose from her scarf, and when he made to pull back, she bolstered her grip around him, holding him there. "Bon," he sighed, lips twitching a bit exasperatedly, though when his eyes finally dragged up to hers, they seemed to catch a bit at her expression.

She was gazing at him. Curiously, intently, indulging in the casual beauty of his face, in how misleading it was. You couldn't tell what he'd come from, looking at him. Couldn't tell from the swathe of shiny hair, the irreverent blue eyes, the old Hollywood jawline—he looked like the kind of guy who'd grown up with a silver spoon dangling from a smirking mouth.

Before the past few days, she'd always assumed his air of detachment and unwillingness to take anything seriously came from a place of privilege, from a position of never having had to face consequences. He'd lounge around their apartment like a bored prince, all tailored suits and stylish ties, and she'd think to herself, 'What a dick.'

Now, even in her hazy, heightened aggressive state, she felt her chest tighten a bit at the reality of his life. At the fact that he was the way he was not because things were too easy, but likely because they were too hard. She felt the embers of her usual compassion stirring in her chest, breaking through the fizzling rage, breaking through the shield of indifference she'd locked over herself for the night, and for a second, she let them through.

"You're more than you think you are."

It was little more than a murmur, but it was firm. She knew what it was like to give in to not caring anymore. She knew how tempting it was, how necessary life could trick you into thinking it was, but God, looking at the lost, guarded face looming over hers, so convinced this was the only way of life he could make sense of, so convinced this was the only road he could walk that wouldn't buckle under the weight of him and everything he carried, all she saw was herself, standing in the middle of a rave, fifteen years old, worthless and numb.

At the time, she'd thought that was all she could ever be, too.

She'd been wrong.

He was wrong.

Quietly, she slipped a hand off his neck and slid it up to his face, tracing the sharp line of his cheekbone with her thumb. He merely hovered there, staring at her, entirely stiff, and she slipped the pad of her finger over the swell of his bottom lip. She remembered biting down on that lip, the feeling of dragging it between her teeth, of drawing blood in the rush of how fire-hot his hands had made her, and somewhere, naturally, there was still a part of her that wanted to flip them over and fall right back into that burning rhythm.

But more than anything, and maybe it was the alcohol finally fading from her system, she wanted to convince him that he meant something. So instead, she tilted her head up until her nose brushed against his, mouths a breath apart. "I'll be too busy avoiding you to say anything tomorrow but…" she eased her lips against his in a brief, feather-light kiss, "thank you for tonight."

And with that, she finally released her koala grip on his rigid frame, easing off of him and curling onto her side. He merely lingered there for a few seconds, the heat of him pleasant against her skin, before slowly pulling back and climbing off the bed. She heard him make his way across the room behind her, steps slow against her creaky North End floorboards, before once again dropping into the armchair he'd claimed for the night.

The corners of her mouth flickered up slightly, and she brought her knuckles up to brush them against her lips—they were buzzing a bit. She wasn't sure what that meant, or that she even wanted to know what that meant, but like pretty much everything that'd happened so far tonight, she pushed off dealing with it until tomorrow. Tonight wasn't about dwelling.

The seconds passed in humming silence, textured only by the faint rush of the storm outside, and after a while, she felt herself finally slipping back into sleep. She wasn't sure if she dreamed it, or if it was a trick of the wind, but just before she drifted off, she heard a faint rumble of words from across the room.

"You're welcome."

* * *

 **A/N: Welp. The drunk!Bonnie rollercoaster is officially over. Next time we see her, she'll be sober and dealing with all of the shit she was too blitzed to care about so far, so wish her luck. I promised drama, I wrote drama, and now I'm so over drama I could burn it alive, so expect a return to feelsiness and humor over the next few chapters. As always, I'm a little nervous about how the dramatic beats and builds turned out here, since I feel like that kind of writing comes far less naturally to me, so if you could drop me a line to let me know how it all worked for you, I'd love you forever. ANYWAY, the worst is over, hopefully the Steroline fluff added some much needed balance to the Bamon intensity, and next few chapters should see both couples taking on pretty fun plots (Kai's coming by to collect on that date). There's still a lot of backstory to unravel with these four, don't get me wrong, but there's going to be some fun along the way** **J Thanks for reading! I'll be posting a bunch of trailers and gifsets on the SMA tumblr ( sixmorningsafter) so keep an eye out for content there.**

 **P.S. I added a new story on this account that's called Six Mornings After: Flashbacks and it's basically going to function as exactly what is sounds like: a collection of one-shot flashbacks about these characters. The one currently up is about Bonnie and Caroline and Matt, and I started off writing it as the opening to this chapter but then (shockingly) it got too long. Point being: it relates to this chapter, so if you want a little more insight into Baroline and why Caroline is so affected by Bonnie here, check it out!**


	13. Deal or No Deal

Six Mornings After

 _Chapter Thirteen: Deal or No Deal_

* * *

The good news was there was no chirping.

No blue skies, no sprawling clouds, no blooming sun to cast a warm glow over the world.

Blizzards were considerate like that.

Bonnie was sitting on her bed with her knees pulled up against her chest, arms circled around her calves, eyes bright and unblinking as they watched the dreary morning crawl up her window. She'd been like that for the past hour or so, stock-still, processing everything that'd gone down the night before.

Every insult. Every look. Every move. They were all filing through her mind in something of an assembly line, sifting and sorting themselves into a sliding scale of categories. Normally in bad situations, she'd start off with the less bad things and work her way up to the abject horror, but after an entire night of indulging in all the worst parts of herself, she wasn't going to give herself that.

She went straight to the horror. Chewing into Stefan about Elena. Calling out Caroline in front of everyone. Airing out a laundry list of things she hadn't talked about since high school and lording it over everyone's head like it was anyone's fault but her own. The blame-shifting. The personal attacks. The visceral, violent need to be the center of attention, to see how hard she could push, how nasty she could get, before everyone had enough and left.

Testing people.

Firing at the ones who'd actually decided to stay.

She _hated_ this part of herself. She _hated_ that six years could go by and a few stupid comments from an all but stranger could send her into a tailspin. She hated how much power it all still had over her, how it could undo everything she'd worked so hard to become in a matter of seconds. It was stupid. Her life was good. Her friends were incredible. She'd come out fine. There were people out there who'd gone through far, far worse.

And yet, despite every awareness of that, the latent anger was always there. Always lingering deep beneath her skin, coded into her DNA like some kind of recessive disease that the right set of conditions could draw out of her. Damon was right. She did keep it in a box. She hid it from Caroline, she'd hidden it from Jeremy, she'd hidden it from past boyfriends, and honestly, if Stefan hadn't literally watched her go through it all, she probably would've hidden it from him, too.

Because hiding it from the people around her was the easiest way to hide it from herself.

She sat up abruptly and drew in a deep breath, scrubbing a hand over face—alright. Enough indulging in her stupid drama. She'd done enough of that over the past ten hours to last a lifetime, and there were far more important things to deal with, chief among them being that she'd hurt people last night. People she loved more than anything, people who didn't deserve it. Righting that wrong was her number one priority, and from this point forward, Disaster Bonnie could go fling herself off a fucking cliff—Real Bonnie was back and she was ready to do what she did best.

Block out the noise and fix things.

She uncurled her legs and swung them off the bed, planting her feet on the floor, and her stare promptly caught on the one thing she hadn't quite worked up the stomach to confront. Her body tensed immediately, fingers tightening the slightest bit around her sheets: Damon was still fast asleep in her armchair. His head was canted to the side, hair loose from its usual coif, a stray lock of it having fallen across his forehead, and despite the dark circles, despite the wash of exhaustion paling his skin, and despite the fact that the armchair he was sprawled over was threadbare and covered in an avalanche of clothes, he managed to look impossibly, offensively elegant.

It might've been funny on another day, how absurd-looking he was. One where, say, she hadn't spent half of the previous night coming onto him and the other half being a raging bitch, maybe. Today, though, the sight of him just made her stomach turn. Some parts of last night were a little hazy, and some parts she was sure she'd forgotten, but the parts with him were almost _spitefully_ clear, like the universe was punishing her for being such an asshole. The closet. Straddling him against the window. Grinding into him. The kissing. The biting. The _grabbing_ , Jesus Christ, the grabbing—she'd shoved her hand down his pants. Aggressively. Unapologetically. And he'd tried to stop her and she just—

She inhaled sharply, shaking her head to try and clear it: she couldn't deal with this right now. Couldn't even begin to come up with how to apologize for it, how to make up for magnitude of how many lines she crossed, and if she was being completely honest with herself… she couldn't deal with the mortification of it all. She had no idea what he was going to wake up like—mad, distant, amused, entirely unaffected—but there was no way he wasn't going to bring up the fact that she'd thrown herself at him last night. Multiple times. Even at the end, when there was no rush of hormones or heat of the moment to wave it off as nothing.

She'd clung to him. Traced her fingers over his lips. Tried to kiss his darkness away like she was some kind of magical fucking reverse-dementor and oh my God she was going to drown herself no no no no _no_.

 _No._

She pushed herself up to her feet and slowly slipped out of the room, bringing an actual hand up to block him from view as she passed. Dramatic? Yes. Necessary? Probably not. Did she care? No. She silently closed the door behind her and drew to a halt at the sight of Stefan sleeping on the couch.

His brow was furrowed in its typical Stefan way, head angled to the side, and her lips pressed together into a thin, guilty line. Back in elementary school, he used to always fall asleep on the morning bus, face drawn into the exact same frown, a frown way too severe for a little kid, and she'd constantly make fun of him for it. Said he looked like he was dreaming big, serious, save-the-world dreams.

And now here he was, fifteen years later, working his ass off to actualize those dreams. No one was surprised—Stefan had always been something of a lion-hearted golden boy—but it didn't make her any less proud of him. Not that anyone would know, given the way she ripped into him last night. Her chest tightened a bit at the memory, and she fought off the instinct to head over to him.

He wasn't her first stop today. He'd seen this before, he had the callouses for it.

She walked past him and, after a brief stop in the bathroom to wash up and splash some cold water on her face, slipped into Caroline's room, gingerly crawled into her bed, and pulled her sleeping form into a sudden, fierce, smothering hug, fluffy blankets and all.

" _What_ the—"

Caroline woke with a start, kicking around in her sheets and letting out a slew of muffled curses until her head emerged from the mess of blankets with a bewildered expression. Her stare flooded with relief upon spotting Bonnie instead of, say, Kai, and she smacked a hand over her heart, eyes snapping shut. "I'm going to kill you," she breathed.

"I have to tell you something first."

She held up a hand, likely catching her breath. "I have to make sure I'm not having a heart attack."

"You're not," Bonnie said matter-of-factly, "but you are one of the strongest, most incredible people I've ever met."

Caroline stilled a bit, eyes fluttering open at the unexpected words. She held Bonnie's stare for a second before dropping her gaze, softening her voice slightly. "Bon, you don't have to—"

"Oh, I'm not done," Bonnie cut in, sounding a lot more lighthearted than she felt—seeing Caroline vulnerable never failed to split her heart in two. Even now, when it was just a small flicker, it gutted her, because it was a flicker she'd caused. A shred of self-doubt _she'd_ caused. And Caroline might've come a long way from the shivering girl trying to hide her bruises in their bathtub, but experiences like that never fully went away.

Hell, Bonnie's entire night was a testament to that.

"When I missed the deadline for registering with pre-Health, I thought I was going to have to delay a whole year before applying to med school because that's what they said my only option was," she began, and Caroline's stare lifted back up to hers. "And I came home crying and upset and thinking the world was over, and do you remember what you did?"

She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. "I called the pre-Health office."

Bonnie let out a bright laugh. "You didn't _call_ the office, you _destroyed_ the office. You busted out the university bylaws and the student handbook and tornado'd your way through every last thing they said till they were so terrified of you that they let me register."

Her lips twitched at the description. "I might've gotten a little intense."

"And then in junior year, when that asshole put PEDs in Tyler's locker and a super lazy investigation got him kicked off the football team, what'd you do?"

Caroline scoffed, shaking her head sleepily. "I don't even remember."

" _You called CNN_."

She lapsed into a chuckle. "I did call CNN."

"You called mothereffin' CNN and said Emory was negligently handling a case against a bisexual latino football star and threatened the school with a discrimination suit."

"I mean, it was true."

"It doesn't matter, most people wouldn't have been able to do that," Bonnie exclaimed, laughter in her voice. " _I_ wouldn't have been able to do that."

"It's just making a couple of phone calls—"

"No, it's not, and you know it," she cut in, shaking her head. "And then there was that time when our landlord was—"

"Stop, you're making me sound crazy," Caroline groaned, burrowing her head into the covers, and Bonnie's eyes widened.

"Not crazy, incredible! You're friggin' incredible and I need you to know that."

"I do know that," Caroline drawled, muffled by the blankets, and Bonnie shook her head.

"I mean it, Care." She reached out and pulled the covers off her face, revealing two slits of blue that were trying and failing to look annoyed. "You're one of the most incredible people I know, and the idea that my raging need to be an asshole last night made you believe that a single iota less, even for a minute, even for a _second_ , kills me."

Caroline held her expressive stare with an exasperated one of her own, though it had an underlying softness. "You underestimate the strength of my ego."

Bonnie shrugged gently. "Maybe, but you still didn't deserve what I said. It wasn't fair, and more importantly, it wasn't true."

" _Mmmmm_ ," Caroline said, scrunching her face up in that way where she tried to make light of things that affected her. "Kinda true."

"Nope," Bonnie said, shaking her head, and her expression grew serious. "No dice. You went through something that would've crippled most people and you came out of it a goddamn _warrior_ and nothing anyone says can ever take that away from you." She felt herself getting a little emotional and swallowed tightly, dropping her gaze to her hands. "Even your shitty best friend."

Caroline's cool exterior broke at the thickness in her voice. "Oh, hell no," she said, fishing her arms out from the blankets and pulling Bonnie into a fierce hug, "no _way_ , you are not allowed to get emotional on me because then _I'll_ get emotional, and when I get emotional, I call CNN."

Bonnie lapsed into a laugh, squeezing her tight. "I can't believe you actually called CNN."

"Didn't some news vans show up at one point?"

"Yeah, a bunch!" Bonnie exclaimed. "They kept trying to interview Tyler and he was so confused."

Caroline let out a bright laugh. "That's right, I didn't even tell him."

Bonnie shook her head, burrowing into her blunt, ferocious blanket monster of a best friend, and for a few seconds they just sat there, a collage of limbs and fading laughter, warmed by the unfailing support of the other. "Hey, Bon?" Caroline ventured, voice taking on a hesitant note, and it was enough to get Bonnie to draw back.

"What's up?"

She dropped her gaze to her hands. "I don't know how much you remember from last night—"

"More than I care to," Bonnie muttered, and Caroline's lips flickered, though her expression stayed serious.

"Well, you kind of… talked about this era in your life…"

Bonnie felt her pulse speed up a bit, chest growing heavy, like her heart was trying to pump cement. She took in a deep breath to try and calm down. She'd known this was coming.

"And I guess I was just wondering, and this might be a totally self-centered question, but—"

"—how come I never told you?" Bonnie offered, and after a reluctant beat, Caroline nodded. Bonnie sighed, dropping her gaze to her fidgeting hands. "Well, first of all, it's not self-centered. You let me in to some really vulnerable stuff and it's pretty fucked up that I didn't do the same."

Caroline shook her head. "It's not that, I'm just… I don't know, wondering if I did something wrong, or something that made you not want to trust me, or—"

"No, _no_ , God, not at all," Bonnie cut in, stare flying up to hers, "that honestly couldn't be further from the truth—it had nothing to do with you." She almost lapsed into a laugh. "Like at risk of sounding like I'm breaking up with you, it wasn't you, it was me."

Caroline's lips twitched, though her stare remained soft and probing. Bonnie pushed a tired hand through her hair, exhaling slowly.

"That stuff all happened in early high school. And I'm not going to lie," she said, throat tightening a bit, "it was pretty bad. But thankfully, I managed to snap out of it, and I got my life back on track, and by the time I was in college, I just…" she shook her head, "I was so, so far away from the person I'd been back then that I didn't even want to acknowledge it happened. Like at all. You can ask Stefan—him and I don't ever talk about it and he was there."

Caroline nodded slowly, taking in her bottom lip. "I mean," she said after a beat, "I know I'm not exactly the poster child for confronting reality or anything, but do you really think that's the healthiest approach?"

Bonnie snorted. "No. Which makes the fact that I criticized the way you dealt with Matt last night _particularly_ rich, I think."

Caroline shook her head. "Don't worry about it."

"No, it was hypocritical as hell."

She scrunched her nose, pretending to weigh it. "I meaaaan."

"Massive levels of hypocrite."

"Yeah, it's pretty bad," she conceded, and Bonnie laughed as she broke into a smile.

"Ugh, Care," Bonnie said in an amused groan, collapsing down against her in a dramatic deflation, though her guilt managed to bleed through the humor, "I'm sorry I dragged you into my mess."

"Seriously, don't make me smack you," Caroline replied, circling her arms around Bonnie's head. "Your mess is my mess and vice-versa."

"Is that the new mi casa es su casa?" Bonnie asked, a little muffled, and Caroline snorted.

"Totally. Mi mess es su mess."

"All the messes."

"Messes forever."

Bonnie grinned, eyes growing a little red from a mixture of residual guilt and relief, though after a moment, they snagged on a stack of papers shoved under Caroline's pillow. She drew back from the hug, stare brightening as it lifted up to Caroline's. "Is that new writing?"

Caroline frowned. "What?"

Bonnie nodded at the papers, squinting to try and read the title. "Terms and Conditions of the Pre—"

"Oh!" Caroline said sharply, shooting a hand out to grab the stack and bringing it up to her chest, dramatically obscuring it from view. "Uh, no, this is just work."

Bonnie's brows shot up in amusement. "Top secret work?"

"Yeah, kind of, it's," Caroline cleared her throat, "it's a contract for this new ad campaign we're doing, and they really want us to keep it hush-hush, so."

Bonnie gave a mysterious nod. "Fashion CIA stuff."

"Fashion CIA stuff," Caroline confirmed, lips flickering in an antsy smile, and Bonnie couldn't help but snort at how twitchy she looked.

Must've been one hell of a contract.

* * *

The fact that Stefan woke to the faint ring of Bonnie's laughter was a good sign.

A really good sign.

Even better was the fact that it seemed to be coming from Caroline's room, which meant she'd probably woken up in her classic Fix It™ mode and was in the middle of the associated apology tour. He felt his chest loosen with relief as he slid a tired hand over his face, exhaling slowly—thank God, honestly. It'd been years since he'd seen her slip into that destructive side, but the memories of it were still fresh in his head. It had the potential to get really bad.

Luckily, it hadn't, and it seemed like the aftermath wasn't too bad either. Whatever Damon had done, it must've worked, and not for the first time, Stefan found himself surprised by the guy. Never in a million years would he have guessed that between the four of them, Damon would be the MVP in a crisis situation. Needless to say, he was grateful as hell for it.

He slowly pushed himself up onto his elbows, wincing at the flare of pain in his neck. God, he'd thought the Law library couches were bad, but Bonnie's couch was on a whole new level—or Caroline's, rather, since Bonnie wasn't really a style-over-comfort person. He imagined her pick would've been the most cuddly, comfortable recliner imaginable. Caroline, on the other hand…

His lips pressed into a pensive line, stare flitting over to her partially ajar door. A faint wash of light was spilling from her room, illuminating the otherwise dark hallway, and he couldn't help but find it a uniquely fitting metaphor for her. A mostly closed door that was just open enough for you to glimpse the flare of sunlight bursting from the other end.

 _No,_ he scolded himself, shaking off his annoying inclination toward romanticizing things. People weren't metaphors. He knew better than that. It was just such a buried instinct in him, to make everything fit an archetype, to mold people and situations into a schema that fit the privileged, idealistic view of the world he'd grown up in. Lexi blamed it on his supposed 'hero complex'. Said that growing up, he'd gotten called one so many times that somewhere along the way, he'd started to believe his life was a Homerian epic.

He couldn't definitively deny it, if he was being honest. As a kid, he'd always embraced the idea of villains and heroes, of rigid morality, of true love and soul mates and everything in between. Elena had been the Penelope to his aspiring Odysseus. Bonnie had been the bright, brazen best friend he'd never in a million years lose. His parents had been the benevolent rulers of their perfect kingdom, and his sisters a trio of bold, beautiful princesses. Saving the world was his battle and he was going to brave it one court case at a time.

And it was bullshit.

It was all bullshit.

Elena was a human being, not a character. He _had_ lost Bonnie for a stretch of time and expanding his preconceived idea of her was the only reason he got her back. His parents had made lots of mistakes, sometimes big ones, and his sisters (with maybe the exception of Rebekah) had no interest in being princesses. And as for him, he wasn't saving the world. He was just pursuing his interests like any other kid in school.

People weren't tropes. Life wasn't a collection of sweeping storybook nods. Flaws and pain weren't invitations for a self-appointed hero to come in and save the day. And Caroline wasn't a door that he was magically destined to open. She was a person, and people opened their own doors whenever and to whomever they wanted.

He pushed himself onto his feet and made his way over to the bathroom, rubbing the back of his throbbing neck. She'd been right about last night, too. The whole questioning his hesitation thing. It'd taken him a bit to come to terms with it, to wade through the initial rush of defensiveness that'd heated his skin, but she was right. There was no speed limit. There was no reason for him to be putting artificial weight on whatever was happening between them. He just didn't really know anything different—he'd only ever played the long game with girls he had any interest in.

It was a textbook case of him restructuring things to fit his expectations. Romanticizing them into something they weren't. And as usual, it made no sense—he wasn't anywhere near the right headspace for starting something serious. More importantly, though, he didn't even know if he _wanted_ anything serious. This was brand new. He had no idea what it was. He had no idea how far it was going to go or how far he even wanted it to go. The only thing he knew was that as of now, he was enjoying it, and honestly? He thought it might be kind of refreshing to leave it at that.

Weightless.

Casual.

God knows he could use a little more of that in his life.

He washed up in the bathroom, debating a shower for a bit before deciding that getting some coffee going for the trio of caffeine addicts he was stuck with was higher priority. Just as he stepped out the bathroom door, however, Bonnie stepped out of Caroline's, and her distracted smile immediately snagged on him.

She slowed to a halt, hands dropping loosely at her sides. Her expression changed, melting into something almost cartoonishly guilty, and the corners of his mouth couldn't help but flick upwards at the expressiveness of her face.

"Mornin', sunshine," he said gently, voice throaty from sleep, and she swallowed thickly.

"I'm going to watch a whole, uninterrupted weekend of Shark Week with you, no complaints, no impressions, no distractions—just silently watching while you unnecessarily repeat every boring thing the narrator says."

His brows ticked upward in amusement. "Really."

She nodded dutifully, eyes a little red. "And I won't fall asleep, either."

"At all?"

She shook her head, fingers curling into anxious fists at her sides.

"For the whole 48 hours."

"Mmm-mmm."

"So even when I fall asleep—"

"I'll stay awake and watch it, and then I'll watch it again when you rewind to catch what you missed even though you've probably already seen the episode thirty times."

He pretended to consider her offer for a few seconds, really just lingering in the relief of seeing her back to her old self, before giving a loose shrug. "Penance accepted. _Although_ , I do have one condition." He lifted his arms with a deadpan expression and she lapsed into a laugh, eyes bright with a watery sheen. "Get in here, Rambo."

She moved forward and collapsed into his arms, abandoning all the tension in her body as it sank into his, and he smiled against her hair. "Stef," she sighed, voice muffled against his shirt, "I—those things I said about Elena, I didn't—"

"Don't worry about it," he said, shoulders easing upwards in resignation. "I mean, they weren't wrong."

She shook her head, pushing back a step to look up at him. "Yeah, they were. You and her weren't some super obvious time bomb—that's like way oversimplifying things. Plus, I made it all sound like your fault and I just—" she pressed her lips together, shaking her head again. "I was just being an asshole last night. I wanted to get a rise out of people and I said that because I knew it'd sting, not because it was true."

He merely stared at her for a few seconds, pensive. The weird thing was, last night, when she'd first said all of it, it _had_ stung. Partly because it was his best friend tearing into him, but also because there was actual truth in the words—truth that he was still, even after two years, battling to come to terms with. But if he was being totally honest with himself, somewhere along the course of the night, he'd kind of just… forgotten about it. The words. The sting. Elena, even.

His head had clouded with someone a little sharper. A little blonder.

 _Stop,_ he groaned mentally, feeling himself doing it again. Adding weight. Fabricating significance. Last night had been pure chaos—obviously he hadn't had time to dwell on Elena. It wasn't anything (or anyone) more specific than that.

"Well, for what it's worth, I'm fine," he said, offering a light shrug that made her eyes fall into a guilty squint.

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I barely remember it."

They flattened at the exaggeration. "Liar."

"Are we sure it was even about Elena?" he pressed, and she began shaking her head with the beginnings of a smile. "In fact, real talk: who's Elena?"

She disentangled from him with a chuckle and gave his shoulder a slight shove, and he shot her an easy smile. "Anyway," she said with a gusty sigh, as if breathing out the final dredges of tension, "how was the rest of your night?"

He paused at the unexpected detour.

The rest of his night.

Right.

"I know the situation kind of left you and Caroline alone together—"

Just a few times. Like on the couch. And in the kitchen. And when he'd kissed his way down the open sprawl of her thighs.

"—and I know you guys aren't exactly…" she waved a hand and he blinked to clear his head, "…you know, besties, but I just hope it wasn't too tense." She stared at him expectantly for a few seconds, hand poised behind the ear she'd just tucked a wayward curl behind, before slipping into a frown. "Stef?"

"Uh, no," he offered vaguely, shaking his head. "No, it wasn't too tense, it was… fine. Good." He gave a flat smile. "Good amount of tense."

What?

Bonnie's brow furrowed in similar question, and he reached up to rub the back of his neck. "I just mean that the tension of the situation actually kind of gave us something in common, so there wasn't really much fighting. We actually made hot chocolate at one point."

Her brows lifted. "Hot chocolate? Am I sensing some bonding here?"

His lips flickered awkwardly. "Wouldn't go that far." She pursed her lips in a playful look, as if gearing up to press the issue, and in order to avoid any outright lying he swapped subjects. "What about you?"

She snorted. "What about me?"

"You and Damon," he prompted, and her gaze snagged a bit, growing owlish. "We kind of sent him into the lion's den last night—hope it wasn't too carnal."

She blinked at him. "What?"

"You know. Lions? Carnage?"

"Right," she said, pushing a hand through her hair, "right, that kind of carna—" she cleared her throat, cutting herself off. "You know, it was actually pretty tame. In the carnage department. I think."

His brow furrowed. "Really?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Wow," he said, genuinely surprised and not entirely sure he believed her—largely because she was acting a little shifty, but also because he just didn't think it was possible. Bonnie was out for blood last night. "I was kind of expecting him to walk out of your room with bite marks."

Her lips pressed into a tight, thin line that looked like it was trying and failing to pass for a smile.

"Well, glad everything's okay between you," he continued after a stilted beat.

"Wouldn't go that far," she mumbled in response, echoing his words from earlier. They merely stared at each other for a few seconds, growing increasingly aware of the tension between them, before she took a deep breath. "Anyway, I'm going to go shower."

"Sure."

He watched her disappear into the bathroom with a puzzled look before turning back toward the hallway. Well, that wasn't suspicious at all. Not that he had any right to judge—he'd basically just verbally tap-danced around the fact that he'd almost had sex with her best friend on their kitchen table last night.

Speaking of.

He shot a brief glance at Caroline's door, now entirely shut, and wondered if he should stop by to say something. Just a quick 'hey, about last night, we're on the same page' to clear the air—things had left off a bit tense between them and he didn't want her to think anything was weird. Or, you know, weirder.

Before he could overthink it in his typical way, he walked up to her door and lifted a hand to knock. It swung open before he even made contact.

"Uh, hi," he said, rearing back a bit at the unexpected sight of her staring him down, hand still caught in the air. "I was ju—"

She grabbed hold of his wrist and yanked him into her room with a swift tug, taking care to poke her head out the hallway and check it was clear before closing the door behind them. She rounded on him with a bright sigh.

"I have something for you."

His brows instinctively ticked upward, blood heating a bit.

I mean, come on. She'd just pulled him into her room. The edge of her bed was inches away from the back of his legs. She was in a flimsy little pajama set that was like 2% silk, 98% skin. She'd had her hand down his pants less than five hours ago.

He really couldn't help where his brain went.

She dashed that theory relatively quickly, though, when she moved past him and swiped a stack of papers off her bedside table. It was thrust out in front of him in a no-nonsense proffer within three seconds.

He blinked at it, still readjusting from what he'd thought she was going to do. "What's this?"

She set her jaw. "A contract."

"For what?"

"You." His brow furrowed and she rolled her eyes, though he noticed the line of her shoulders seemed a bit tenser than usual. "And me. Us. Our…" she waved her free hand between the two of them before swallowing quickly, "whatever."

That caught his attention, and he glanced back down at the papers with a look of slow, kindling recognition. She… she didn't _actually_ … he pressed his lips together to curb the sudden flare of amusement that shot through him.

"Take it," she said, giving the 'contract' an impatient waggle, and he grabbed the stack and brought it up to read the title.

"Terms and Conditions of the Pre-coital Agreement between C. Forbes and S. Salvatore."

His stare slid back up to hers and she nodded. "That's right."

"Pre-coital agreement."

"Mm-hmm." He blinked at her and she gave an irritable shrug. "It's like prenuptial, except sex-based."

"Makes sense."

"I know." He merely held her gaze for another disbelieving beat and she gave an impatient wave of her hand. "I mean, aren't you going to read it?"

"Oh, absolutely," he replied, glancing down as he thumbed through the numerous pages. "Just might need a minute to get through all…" he squinted for a beat, "seventeen pages of it."

"Fifteen," she corrected, and his gaze swung back up to hers. "The last two are just footnotes."

Footnotes.

He tried to stifle the twitch at his lips— _footnotes,_ though—but he must've failed because her expression slowly hardened. "I thought lawyers were supposed to appreciate detail."

"Only the good ones," he countered, attention back on the actual manifestation of Type A lunacy in his hand. One of the sections was called the 'Acceptable Noise Level Clause' and his stare grew increasingly brighter as it drifted down the page.

 _In the event that a non-privy party is in an adjacent room, any cries, moans, growls, or otherwise audible expressions of pleasure will not exceed 60 decibels._

 _In the event that a non-privy party is in a non-adjacent room that falls within a 200-foot radius of the sexual event, audible expressions of pleasure will not exceed 70 decibels._

"Out of curiosity," he deadpanned, brows gathering into a frown, "how would we go about tracking our decibel levels? Like is there some kind of app we can use that'll beep at us if we're exceeding a set level, or…?"

Her stare was sharp and annoyed and he shrugged.

"Maybe we can program it to say something, like it can go 'HEY MOAN QUIETER' so it feels a little more personal."

"Or maybe we can forgo any sex of any kind so there's no moaning to worry about," she countered frostily, crossing her arms over her chest, and he lapsed into a chuckle. "Laugh all you want, but I'm not getting near you till you read, understand, and agree to those terms."

"No, I know, I respect that, I just," he lapsed into another laugh as he glanced at the contract. "I mean, Jesus, Caroline, did you even sleep?"

"I slept enough."

"I really don't see how that's possible."

"I really don't see how your opinion on that matters."

He was honest to God trying not to find it all funny. Like, beneath the humor he understood that, overzealous though it was, she'd put a ton of time into this and it was obviously important to her. He understood his amusement was rightfully pissing her off. But _maximum decibel levels._

"Look, if you're not going to take this seriously—" she began walking to the door and he lifted a hand.

"No, I am, I just…" he cleared his throat, forcing his entertained expression to sober. "I am."

"Really."

"Yeah, I just needed a second to take it all in."

She eased to a halt by the door and crossed her arms, skeptical, and he dropped his gaze back to the contract, keeping it dutifully void of any glitter.

 _Maximum post-coital lingering time will be strictly proportional (10%) to the amount of time spent on total sexual activity, though an additional five percent can be appended (to total 15%) in cases of extreme energy expenditure._

The corners of his mouth struggled not to flicker upwards. "So for the cuddling rules—"

"Post-coital lingering time," she corrected, and he set his jaw.

"Right—could you give an example of what would constitute 'extreme energy expenditure'?"

He glanced up with curious look and she merely stared at him, as if trying to gauge if it was actually a sincere question.

"Like would we be doing zumba on the side, or—"

Her stare slitted as he fell into another laugh—God, he was trying , he really was—and before he could even manage to get ahold of himself, she was striding over to him. "I-I'm sorry," he managed between breaths, lifting his palms, "I swear I'm—"

She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him into a swift, sudden, disorienting kiss. His mind immediately blanked. The laughter died on his tongue, entirely forgotten, replaced by surprise. Surprise and then warmth. Warmth and then heat. Heat and then instincts.

He dropped the contract on the bed and slid his arms around her waist, not even bothering with the fact that her reaction made no sense—her mouth was hot and demanding and that was the only thing he was processing. She twined her arms around his neck, fingers diving into his hair in a hungry pull, and he brought her warm body flush against his. His pulse spiked at thinness of her pajamas—he could feel every dip and curve of her in agonizing detail and it completely shifted the direction of his blood flow.

"Do you like this?" she asked cryptically between heated kisses, walking them backwards toward the bed, and he barely even processed the question—one of her hands was snaking down his stomach. "The way my hand feels on you?"

His blood flared with adrenaline as her palm skimmed over the stiffening swell in his sweatpants, giving him disorienting flashbacks to the night before. The back of his knees hit the edge of the bed and she pushed him down onto it with a swift shove. "The way _I_ feel on you?"

She climbed onto him in a thoroughly derailing straddle, flipping her hair as she dove for his neck. Her hips began rocking against his in a rhythm that blurred the edges of his vision, hot mouth working its way up his jaw, and his throat closed up like a lock, fingers curling into loose fists against the mattress behind him.

"Do you want know what more would feel like?"

She took his earlobe between her teeth as his pupils blew with arousal—everything, the weight of her, the flare of her hot breath, the friction of her hips, the barely there pajamas, was shunting the blood away from his brain.

" _Then read the damn contract_."

It was hissed directly into his ear.

And before he could so much as blink, she'd disentangled herself from him, hopped to her feet, and breezed out of her room, not even bothering with so much as a glance over her shoulder. No parting words. No qualifiers. Just him staring at the empty doorway, lips parted, body humming with adrenaline.

Well.

He cleared his throat.

Probably should've seen that coming.

He shot a brief glance down at the contract, and despite his buzzing state, an instinctive flicker of humor shot through him.

Definitely hadn't seen that coming, though.

He let out a low sigh, scrubbing a stiff hand over his face to try and clear his disjointed head. Ease the overstimulated high. Shake the daze.

'Cause he had some serious reading to do.

* * *

Bonnie had a problem.

Another one, anyway. The morning was rife with them, but this one was a little bit… different. It'd started in the shower, fresh off the heels of having smoothed things over with Caroline and Stefan. She was finally breathing a bit easier, and without that tension taking up so much of her mental real estate, her brain finally had room for other things to slip in. Things she hadn't picked up on earlier. Things she'd been too preoccupied to notice.

Things like a newfound and wildly unwelcome physical attraction to Damon.

It happened in flares. The first time, she'd been lathering shampoo into her hair, anxiously rehearsing what she was going to say to him in her head. Then slowly, without even noticing the shift, she just slipped into a hazy image of him there in the shower with her, crowding her against the slippery tile. His skin was hot against hers, eyes hooded and dark with adrenaline, and it got as far as him grabbing her by the thighs and hoisting her up before she managed to snap herself out of it. It was so unexpected that all she could do was blink, stock-still beneath the shower spray.

It happened again while she was putting on lotion. Her hands were rubbing cocoa butter onto her legs, mind floating in the steamy fog of the bathroom, and then all of a sudden they weren't her hands anymore. They were bigger and rougher, fingers teasing as they roved over her skin. He was standing behind her in the swirling steam, murmuring shithead-y things into her ear as he rubbed small, goading circles up her thighs, and she smacked the bottle of lotion down onto the counter to break the daze.

What the actual _fuck_.

She'd always been thoughtlessly immune to Damon. Like objectively, she understood that he looked like a model, but it never did anything for her—in fact, she generally found the whole pretty boy thing to be kind of a turn off. She'd always been attracted to groundedness and stability, to humble guys who didn't realize they were cute, to hard-workers who knew how to take things seriously. Damon was literally none of those things. He was all froth. Whimsically narcissistic froth. Or at least, that's what he chose to be.

But even more than all that, the night before had been an absolute shit-show. She'd been angry and indulgent and selfish, and no part of it, none, should've been making her feel anything other mortified. Any thoughts she was having about Damon were supposed to be thick with guilt or embarrassment, but instead, here she was, having inconvenient friggin' _sex fantasies_ before she'd even gotten a chance to apologize to him. Intense ones. Pulse-skittering ones. Ones that, for all she knew, could be based on an experience that had made him feel wildly uncomfortable. What the hell was _wrong_ with her?

She caught a glance of herself in the foggy mirror, eyes wide and countenance thoroughly off-kilter, and she promptly steeled her face, taking a few steps forward and shoving a finger at her reflection. " _Stop_ it." Her fierce face glared back at her, hair a springy mass of wet curls around her head and brown skin dewy from the steam wafting through the bathroom, and after a few seconds, she dropped her hand.

Honestly, she wasn't super sure what that accomplished but it made her a feel a little more in control of herself so whatever. She tossed her towel into the laundry basket and headed out toward the kitchen, reveling in the splash of cool air against her skin. Maybe all the steam had just been making her dizzy. Hallucinations were a pretty common symptom of heatstroke—it wasn't a huge stretch. In fact, that was definitely it. She just needed to stop taking super hot showers. _Boom._ Damon problem solved.

#Science.

Her tentative plan was to wake him up with a friendly cup of coffee and nip this whole thing in the bud. Apologize, figure out where his head was at, talk any potential friction or misunderstandings out, done. That made her sound a lot calmer about the situation than she actually felt, given the things she'd done, the things she'd said to him, and the kinds of vulnerabilities she'd let him see, but she was determined to grit her teeth and see it through. Well-adjusted Bonnie was back and wasn't going anywhere, bitches.

And then the third fantasy struck.

She was getting the milk out of the fridge, normal as can be, when an absent-minded memory of the time she'd bandaged his hand up in the same spot flickered through her head. And then slowly, in a wave of heat, reality dimmed and she was back in that moment, except this time she'd abandoned the first aid kit and had him pinned to the floor, caught up in some kinky game of Doctor. Her vision blurred with clenched fingers and rhythmic hips and ragged breaths against bare skin, and it was easily the most graphic of the daydreams so far—which likely explained why she jumped and dropped the milk carton in her hand when Stefan wandered into the kitchen.

"Whoa," he said, lifting his palms in an 'easy' gesture. "I come in peace."

"Sorry, I just, uh…" she scrubbed a horrified hand over her face as she picked the carton back up, forcing herself to clear her head, "I'm still reeling a bit from last night."

Wasn't a lie.

Stefan's face softened a bit at the words, seeming to take them as guilt, and it only made her stomach turn more. "For what it's worth, it wasn't as bad as you think, Bon."

 _Ohhhh_ , yes, it was.

"I know, I'm just," she waved a hand, swallowing thickly, "you know, acclimating back to reality and all that."

"I get it," he said with a nod, and she forced a quick smile.

She _really_ doubted that.

After a beat, however, her stare caught on the familiar stack of papers in his hand, and her brow furrowed. "Is that Caroline's contract?"

His face froze. Like literally went stock still. Her brows lifted as he just stared at her, blank-faced, before stiffly clearing his throat. "What?"

"Her work contract," she repeated slowly, puzzled by his weirdo reaction, "for that new ad campaign she's on?"

" _Right_ ," he said immediately, a swell of realization coming over him, and his entire body seemed to loosen in response. "Yeah, that, uh—she wanted me to give it a read to, you know," he shot the papers a brief glance, "verify all the legal terminology."

Her brows remained knitted over her eyes as she watched him, trying to identify what was off. Stefan didn't exactly have a tell when he was lying—there was no specific habit or go-to look that gave him away—but she always just knew. It was like a dog whistle that she couldn't technically hear but was still instinctively aware of somehow. Plus, Caroline had been guarding that contract with her life before—it was pretty weird that she'd trusted Stefan with it.

Regardless, she figured she had no right to be pushy after her meltdown last night, so she shrugged it off, focusing instead on the positive. "Well, check you two out," she ventured, uncapping the milk and pouring a bit into the mug in a blind approximation of how Damon took his coffee. "First hot cocoa, then helping each other with work—keep it up and you might accidentally become friends."

He brought an awkward hand up to rub the back of his neck. "Wouldn't want that."

"Right, 'cause then we'd have to deal with all the flying pigs and hell freezing over." She shot him a teasing look and he offered a vague smile in response. Her brows flickered slightly again.

Something was definitely weird.

After a few seconds, he nodded to the mug she was stirring some sugar into. "If you wait a few minutes, I can make us some real coffee."

Her face fell into a defensive look. "This is real coffee."

"That's sugar and milk."

" _Uh,_ no, it's not." He snorted as he approached the coffeemaker, plucking the pot out and draining it in the sink without even bothering to try it. "Stefan!"

"I'm doing everyone a favor."

"You're wasting coffee!"

"You mean all two teaspoons of it?" he asked, eyeing the suspiciously light brown liquid with an amused look. "This is coffee-flavored water."

"You're a snob."

"I'm a hero."

"A snob with delusions of grandeur."

"Don't all snobs have delusions of grandeur?"

"No, some of them actually have grandeur."

"But I don't."

"No, just delusions." His lips twitched as he began to refill the machine, and after a few seconds he shot her a warm look. "What?"

He shrugged, still smiling as his gaze returned to the coffeemaker. "Just happy to have you back, is all."

Her cheeky mood faded a bit, skin warming with a prickling mixture of sentimentality and guilt. She knew he meant it as a good thing, but all it did was remind her of how hard she'd tried to push him away back in high school. Stefan had endured more of her self-isolating bullshit than was fair to ask of anyone, and every time the fog cleared and the dust settled, no matter what she'd said or how hard she'd pushed him, he was always there in the morning. Calm. Level-headed. Ready to help her pick up the pieces. She imagined that's what having reliable parents felt like, or maybe what having a close sibling might feel like, but honestly, she didn't know.

Growing up, all she'd really known was Stefan. And that for some reason, something bigger than blood or genetics, he would always, always be there the next day, bitching about her breakfast taste and ready to tackle the future. There were moments where she felt like she didn't deserve him. Lots of them, if she was being completely honest. She pressed her lips together, overcome by an unexpected and super stupid wave of emotion, and before she could stifle it, she set the mug down, moved forward, and wrapped her arms around his waist.

He let out a chuckle at the unexpected move. "Bon—"

She buried her head against his arm, squeezing him tightly, and he twisted around with a sigh and pulled her into their second hug of the day, arms circling around her shoulders. He dwarfed her by nearly a foot, the sight almost comical, and she closed her eyes against his chest, listening to his heart for a few beats. "You know I love you, right?" It was muffled against his shirt.

"Psh," he said, voice lighthearted, "I've known that since Tracy Grantley called me a nerd and you switched the fake dirt in her oreos and gummy worms to real dirt."

"Tracy Grantley was a bitch."

He snorted, chin propped against her hair. "We were in first grade."

She shrugged. "She was a bitch in first grade and she's probably still a bitch now."

"Yeah, she was kind of the worst." She held onto him for a little longer, lingering in the familiar, stable comfort of him, before pulling back a bit and meeting his gaze. It was gentle and amused. "You know I love _you_ , right?"

She pressed her lips together and gave a tired sigh. "Yeah." Her mouth flickered a bit uncertainly at the corners. "Don't always understand _why_ , but…"

He scoffed at the comment. " _Bon_."

She disentangled herself and grabbed the mug off the counter, shooting him a brief smile to signal she was kidding—she wasn't, but she knew that would bother him. "I've got to go run damage control with Damon." She lifted the mug in a half-hearted toast before turning around and heading toward the door. "Wish me luck, bro."

"That coffee's not going to do you any favors."

"Did I say wish me luck or bitch about my coffee some more?"

"G'luck."

"Thank you."

"Your coffee sucks."

She rolled her eyes as she swept into the living room, the warm, sentimental hum in her veins slowly starting to shift back into nerves. Her door was a few feet away, closed and silent. Ominous. Waiting.

 _Okay_ , she snapped at herself, steeling her face, _stop being Caroline._ She could do this. No drama. No nerves. This wasn't a big deal. This was easy. In fact, he was probably sitting in that chair like some easy, breezy, beautiful cover girl, happy as a clam and totally unfazed. And the fantasies she kept having? Definitely because she hadn't gotten any in a few months, and as messed up as last night's circumstances might've been, it was still, you know, hot mouths and skin on skin, and that kind of thing left an impression.

A temporary one.

Super temporary.

This was fine.

She was fine.

 _Go time._

She reached for the door and slipped into the room, taking care to close it silently behind her. Not because anything was going to happen, _obviously_ , but because they were probably going to be discussing things she wasn't sure the entire apartment needed to know about. He was in the same position she'd left him in, sleeping face illuminated in a soft slant of dreary morning light, and after a few seconds of mental bracing, she sidled over and turned to face him, profile a hazy silhouette against the window.

"Damon," she said gently, mug warm against her fingers.

No response.

She tried it again a bit louder, blinking expectantly, and he merely lay there, sprawled and unmoving. Screw peacekeeping: she shot a foot out and kicked the chair, jostling it enough to get a reaction out of him. She'd expected a deep breath or a groan, something along his typical lazy lines, but to her surprise, he jolted awake kind of violently, fingers clenching into the chair arms and head snapping up. Her palms flew up at the harsh reaction. " _Whoa_ —"

His chaotic stare sliced up and landed on hers, and after a few seconds, the layer of turbulence brightening the blue faded. His shoulders loosened. His eyes fell into a squint, pupils shrinking into pinpricks in the light coming in from the window. Unsure of what else to do, she held the mug out in front of his face—the steam curling out of it flared bright white as it caught the sun. "Peace offering," she explained, voice uncertain, and he dropped his gaze to the coffee for a second before lifting it back up to hers.

He slowly pushed himself up from his slump of a position, wincing a bit in the process. "Didn't realize we were at war." His voice was a thick rumble, graveled from a mixture disuse and how loud the night before had gotten, and she blinked at him, still stuck on the intensity of his reaction. He, on the other hand, seemed entirely uninterested in lingering on it as he took the coffee from her and settled back against the chair, face gradually slipping into a curious expression.

A few humming seconds of silence passed between them before she cleared her throat—probably best to just leave it alone. "So."

He gave a subtle tip of his mug. "So."

"Last night."

"Last night," he agreed.

"It…" she pushed an awkward hand through her damp hair, swallowing thickly, "it was…"

His brows rose curiously. "It was…"

She dropped her hand in a flare of annoyance that didn't really align with her whole apologizing plan. "Are you just going to repeat everything I'm saying, or—"

"No, sorry, just processing," he replied, waving his mug a bit before taking a sip, and his smirk promptly shifted into a grimace. He shot her a baffled look as he swallowed the coffee. "You call this a peace offering?"

"I thought it'd mean more if I made it myself," she muttered, and he glanced back down at the mug, lip curling in distaste.

"Sometimes less is more, kid."

"I was a total bitch to you yesterday." It was a quick pivot and she knew it, but the sooner she got what she needed to say out, the sooner she could go crawl into a hole and start avoiding him. He merely scrutinized her for a second and she averted her gaze. "I mean, I was a bitch to everyone, but, you know, especially you." She stared at her fidgeting hands. "And I'm not sure how to even begin to apologize for all of it."

After a beat, his brows lifted. "Well, the good news is you don't need to."

Her stare slid back up to his. "Are you kidding?"

"No," he said with a shrug. "I pushed, you snapped, I was an asshole, you were an asshole, it happens."

Her face fell into a frown. "Damon, I attacked you."

" _Eh_."

"I elbowed you in the face," she pressed on, brows lifting in a bewildered look. "Not to mention insulted you and yelled at you and, you know," she swallowed uncomfortably, "other things."

His lips twitched at the euphemism, though to her surprise, he didn't pounce on it like she'd expected him to. "You were mad."

She scoffed. "And that's an excuse for being a ragey bitch?"

"I mean, it's a reason."

"It's not a good one."

"I didn't say it was a good one."

"Well, you know," she lifted an exasperated hand up, "good."

His eyes narrowed a bit as they observed her, bright with amusement. "Are you actually getting mad at me for not being mad at you?"

"No," she replied, countenance a bit flustered. "Yes. No. I mean—" she waved a hand at him, "it'd just be more helpful if you were taking this seriously."

"What makes you think I'm not taking it seriously?"

"The fact that you're telling me I don't need to apologize."

His eyes thinned in confusion. "You don't."

" _Yeah_ , I do."

"Pretty sure I get to make that call."

" _Well_ ," she began, tone a bit blustery, "no."

"No?"

"No."

"This is the angriest apology I've ever gotten."

"I—this isn't," she sighed exasperatedly, "this isn't the apology, this is me trying to get you to let me apologize."

He stifled a laugh. "I never said you couldn't apologize."

"Yes, you did."

"No, I said you didn't need to."

"Well, _fine_ , then I'm going to do it anyway."

"Go for it."

" _Sorry_."

He merely held her gaze with a bright, expectant one of his own, brows arched over his eyes. A few seconds passed. "Better?"

She let out a frustrated sigh. "No."

He lapsed into a throaty chuckle, eyes veering ceiling-ward. "Kid—"

"You told me about your family last night."

His easy voice petered out, leaving a swift, tangible vacancy in the air. She averted her eyes, fingers curling into loose, uneasy fists at her sides.

"You talked about it, and it doesn't seem like something you do particularly often, and instead of listening to you, I made it about me." She bit her lip. "About my life, about my experiences. And I hate that I did that, because what it seems like you went through, I mean…" she shook her head, "that's not the starting point of an argument. That doesn't deserve a rebuttal, it just… sorry." She lifted her stare back up to his, and unsurprisingly, it was tough to read. "About all of it. About me. About your parents. They, uh…" she cleared her throat, looking for the right thing to say, the tactful thing to say, though after a second, she considered who she was talking to. She glanced up at him and abandoned the filter. "Well, honestly, they sound like garbage."

His stare lit with a glint of surprise, lips flickering vaguely at the bluntness of the comment.

"And I may not know a whole lot about you," she continued a bit hastily, not wanting to lose her nerve, "but I do know that if it weren't for you stepping in last night, there's a pretty solid chance I'd be dead or, I don't know, pregnant, and even more importantly," she inhaled deeply, stare dropping to the floor, "I'd have two best friends I wouldn't even be able to look in the eye right now. But," she lifted her gaze back up to his, "you did step in. And you kept me in one piece, and you took the brunt of my crazy, and now you're sitting there being kind of annoyingly cool about it all, and I guess I just…" she searched around for the words for a second before exhaling loosely. "Thank you."

He merely eyed her for a second, processing. "You told me you'd be too busy avoiding me to thank me."

She brought a hand up to rub her neck, trying to ignore the memory of what that comment had led to. "Well, I'm not."

His lips ticked upward. "I see that."

"Not that I'm not planning on avoiding you," she clarified, swallowing tightly, "I'm absolutely going to avoid you, just, you know… not before thanking you."

His brows lifted. "Considerate."

"Yep."

She stood around awkwardly for a few seconds, shifting her weight on her feet, and his brow furrowed. "Starting now, or…?"

"Not quite," she said, biting her lip—alright, Bonnie. Just spit it out and get it over with. This was fine. She could do this. "So, okay, like… we obviously both know that some other things happened last night."

He had the fucking nerve to look puzzled. "Other things?"

Her wince melted into a flat look. " _Yeah_ , Damon. Other things."

He chewed the inside of his cheek, innocent as can be. "You mean like when you tried to make a fort out of knives, or…?"

She crossed her arms, combative streak flaring enough to momentarily mute her nerves. "Actually, I meant like getting halfway through a handjob, but sure, we can throw in the knife fort."

His brow slid upward at the bluntness of the response, clearly not expecting it, and honestly, she didn't blame him because neither had she. "Halfway through?" he said after a beat, pursing his lips briefly. "Give my stamina a little more credit.

Her eyes thinned in a flicker of boldness. "You wouldn't have lasted ten minutes."

"I wouldn't have needed ten minutes."

She held his dark, glinting stare as he took a casual sip of his coffee, the implication of 'to have returned the favor' floating in the air between them, and echoes of the night before began to whisper through her head—the deep, guttural growl when she'd bitten him, the hitch of her breath when he'd dug his fingers into her thighs, the grinding click of his jaw whenever he'd clenched it in restraint. She pressed her lips together in a tight line: _nope_.

Absolutely not the mental detour she needed to be taking right now.

"Anyway," she said, breaking eye contact, "on the subject of, you know…"

"…other things," he offered, and she tightened her jaw.

"Right, that, I… well," she lapsed into a humorless laugh, "I know this is really immature and I should probably just grow up and deal with it, but in light of the number of self-created disasters I'm trying to clean up today…" she reached a hand up to rub the back of her neck, eyes slowly lifting to his, "is there any way we could just… I don't know, forget any of that happened?"

He stared at her and she tried not to fidget. She knew how dumb it sounded. What was she, thirteen and asking a boy she kissed at a party not to tell the whole school? It was just, given this new, highly inconvenient, kindling awareness of him, she didn't trust herself to handle it well. Later, with a little space? Sure. Because this was obviously just a temporary side effect of almost having sex with him. But right now, talking about any of that felt like a rabbit hole waiting to happen.

"Forget? Probably not," he ventured after a few seconds, and she dropped her gaze to the floor. "Pretty you'd have to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that out of me. _Pretend_ , on the other hand…" her gaze snapped up to his and he shrugged, eyeing her edgy state a bit more gently. "Pretend, I can do."

"Really?"

"Sure."

"As in pretend it never happened?"

"Pretend what never happened?"

A flare of relief washed over her—she couldn't believe he was being so cool about this.

"Pretend you didn't try to ride me right on that window?

Her face froze. For a second, they merely stared at each other, a flare of tension thickening the air between them. And then his lips twitched.

"Pretend I wasn't about to rock you world."

She felt her shoulders loosen a little bit.

"Pretend you weren't screaming my name all night?"

"Okay," she drawled, lifting a hand with an eye roll, "there was no screaming of any names."

"There was definitely some screaming."

"Not the good kind."

"Moaning."

"I actually remember crying."

"Yeah, like crying out."

"No, like literal tears of sadness."

"Over how much you realized you'd been missing out on this whole time," he explained, gesturing casually, and she pressed her lips together, giving him a frank look—God, this guy was a headache.

"Is this your version of pretending nothing happened?"

His brows dove downward, deadpan. "Did something happen?"

She tossed her head back with a sigh. "You're exhausting."

"That's not what you said last—"

" _Damon_."

She swung her head back up and he lifted his hands up in easy surrender, mouth twitching a bit. "Had to get it all out of my system."

"Great, is it?" she said exasperatedly, aware that she was asking him for a favor yet still unable to curb her aggravation, and he waved a hand.

"Totally done."

"You sure?"

"Mmm-hmm."

"So if I asked you what happened last night, you'd say—"

"We played a rousing game of Yahtzee."

"That still sounds sexual."

His eyes narrowed curiously. "Does that say more about me or you?"

"Damon."

"Not going to lie, I feel a little objectified."

Her gaze rolled upward.

"Typecast, even."

"Can we focus?"

"Like what, just because I'm pretty I can't make innocent references to antiquated past times?"

Her jaw tightened.

"They _have_ to be innuendos for sexual things that didn't happen but lowkey did happen?"

"Okay—"

"I can't just exist as a strikingly attractive nonsexual crea—"

She surged forward and flattened an irritated hand over his mouth, not really thinking the move through, and in a dazzling exhibition of her luck lately, it introduced a shift into the room. The diminished space between them grew a bit… charged. Thick. Humming with a mixture of memories and possibilities. His mouth was warm against her hand, the skin of his cheek a little rough with stubble, and for a split second, she was straddling him against the chair, dragging her fingers across that stubbled jawline as his hot mouth seared down her collarbone in a heady, hungry, reckless round two.

She cleared the uninvited mental image with a firm shake of her head—how fucking long were these little visions of hers going to last?—and he slowly lifted his brows over his eyes. "Um," she drew back, dropping her hand hastily, "sorry, I just…" she gave it a tense wave, "I need you to focus."

"Mm," he hummed, stare flitting over her face in a way that made her skin heat up a bit. "Think I'm focused now."

She swallowed tightly. "Good."

Another long, lingering beat stretched between them, punctuated only by the whistle of the wind outside, before he straightened up a bit in the chair, clearing his throat. "Anything particular I should be focusing on, or?"

"Uh, yeah," she said with a nod, taking a subtle step back. "Yeah, I need to know for sure that we're on the same page about last night."

"Why wouldn't we be?"

She scoffed a bit. "Because you seem to be changing your mind every other sentence."

"We're on the same page."

She exhaled tightly. "Damon—"

"Look," he said with a dramatic sigh, "I kept you from climbing out of your window, fought with you till you tired yourself out, and then made sure you fell asleep before calling it a night." He held up a hand. "Good?"

"That's fine."

"Cool, then," he shrugged, "same page."

She gave an awkward nod. "Great."

Yet _another_ thick silence fell over them, and she chewed the inside of her lip, wondering how many of them she'd have to weather before they were back to normal. Whatever _that_ was. Friends? Acquaintances? People who knew weird, hyper personal things about each other and not a whole lot else? She honestly had no idea. What she did know, though, was that at some point in the past few days, they'd had a stretch where talking to each other had been easy. When he'd given her advice in Caroline's room. When they'd gone on that search and rescue mission for Stefan. When she'd stitched up his hand up. All of it had been easy.

And then she'd let a few drunken comments of his get under her skin and screw it all up. Nothing he'd even said had been that bad, it'd just been… well, frankly, triggering. She'd gotten really comfortable in the optimistic bubble she lived in. Like she'd told Caroline, it'd been _years_ since she'd waded into her issues, years since she'd slipped into an unspoken agreement with Stefan to just not bring it up, to the point where she actually managed to forget it happened sometimes.

And then a few nights ago, he'd popped that bubble like it was easy. She'd felt so unexpectedly exposed, standing there with him looming over her, murmuring that they were the same. She'd felt like he was staring right past the buoyant, driven person she'd worked so hard to become, like he saw straight through to the self-destructive teen she hated ever being. She'd felt like he was telling her that was who she really was. And it'd rattled the hell out of her.

"Welp," he said after a long beat, dropping his hands against the armrests, "as fun and not awkward as this little moment we're having is, I'm pretty sure this coffee's a biohazard, so I'm going to go track Stefan down."

She tensed as he got to his feet, tall frame a sudden wall of warmth opposite her, and in her spastic haste to avoid physical contact, she took a jerky step back. It must've been a really obvious one, because he eased to a halt, brows lifting in a slow, point-blank 'really' look. She balked. "I—sorry, I just—"

"I heard you loud and clear about last night, kid."

He thought she was worried about what he might do. She almost laughed at the irony. "No, I know, that wasn't a—" she waved a hand, "I didn't mean to imply, like… I was just…" she cleared her throat, "stretching." His eyes thinned, brows gathered into a furrow, and after a beat, she clapped her hands together. " _Anyway_ , good talk." She began backing away. "Thanks for being so cool about everything, I—" she stumbled on a discarded shoe and forced a smile, "—really appreciate what you did last night, so—" a flicker of dread shot through her as she processed how that sounded "—in terms of watching me, you know, not like the other stuff—the other stuff was—" she stumbled on her sprawled backpack and shot it a fierce glare before swinging a forcibly pleasant stare back up to him, feet finally coming to a halt. "Thanks."

His face was stuck in the exact same baffled look. "Sure."

She held up a spunky thumbs up that she immediately regretted, and he eyed it for a long, demoralizing second before thrusting his own thumb over his shoulder. "I'm going to go find Stefan."

"Sounds good," she said, "I'm just going to hang back here for a bit and," she gestured at the desk behind her, mind blanking, "you know, just..."

His brows slowly ticked upward. "Get a jump on avoiding me?"

"Basically, yeah." What was the point, she wasn't fooling anyone.

"Good luck with that." His hand lifted into a thumbs up that was clearly mocking hers from earlier, and she chewed her lip—she deserved that.

He gave her a final, vaguely mystified onceover before turning around waltzing out of the room, and she immediately released the breath she'd been holding, deflating into her desk chair.

Super awkward apology—check.

Now she could move on to full-on avoidance until she figured out how to get a handle on whatever the hell was going on with her hormones. Like actually, though. She'd thought it was bad earlier, but being physically near him? Whole new level of horny cat lady. She needed space. Lots of it. Enough to remember that this was the same guy she'd seen hump a stop sign and do body shots off a Nicholas Cage impersonator. And yeah, obviously there was a lot more to him than met the eye, but the part of her slipping into X-rated fantasies about him wasn't dealing in that—it was completely, egregiously shallow.

Or at least, that's what she told herself.

That's what she stubbornly oversimplified it into as she plucked up her urology notes and forced herself to look them over.

Because if she was keepin' it a hundred, she'd probably recognize that it had everything to do with all the roughened up layers of him she'd encountered last night. That she was right—frothy, narcissistic pretty boys weren't her thing, and contrary to the conclusions she was inventing, they still weren't, because last night? Last night she hadn't been dealing with a frothy pretty boy. She hadn't been kissing cocky, indulgent lips or wrapped around a ouche, gym-obsessed body. She hadn't dug her hands into smugly manicured hair or bitten into baby soft skin.

Last night, she'd been tangled up with a street kid. A bitter-tasting, rough-handed, smoky-eyed product of broken homes, hearts, and bones. He'd kissed her like he was starting a fight, dug his fingers into her like someone used to having things ripped away from him, and if she wasn't so hellbent on avoiding thinking about that part of her life, she'd have recognized it. The like-on-like pull. The familiar rush of rawness. The fearlessness of it all, of feeling like she wasn't pretending anymore, of being realer and messier than she'd ever been with Jeremy or any other boyfriend.

But alas, she wasn't really dealing in real talk at the moment, so she merely continued to scan over her notes, half-paying attention, relieved as hell to finally have some space.

* * *

Confusing.

That was the takeaway Damon decided he was going with.

Bonnie Bennett was an unexpectedly confusing person.

And the thing was, when he'd first met her, she seemed super straightforward. Hell, he thought he'd had her pegged at least five different times over the past few days—harmless drunk, goody-goody on the brink, etc.—but for some reason, despite his usual knack for reading people, he kept managing to be a few degrees off about her. Sometimes more than a few.

So it probably shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise when instead of the solemn, withdrawn Bonnie he'd expected to be dealing with today, he was met with an awkward, fidgety weirdo who'd seemingly forgotten how to walk without stumbling.

And gave unironic thumbs ups.

And bickered her way through unnecessary apologies.

And had these unpredictable moments of blunt, unintentional sexiness that grabbed him by the goddamn throat—though, God forbid she heard him even think that, given her newfound aversion to him. Like what even was that? Honestly, he hadn't been sure how sober her was going to react to all the stuff that'd gone down last night, but he definitely hadn't anticipated visceral horror. A little evasiveness? Sure. Some awkwardness? Fine. But she'd literally looked like she was going to crawl out of her skin whenever he was near her, as if he was this big bad wolf who could pounce on her at any moment.

He didn't love it.

Largely because it was just annoying. But a little bit because part of him had come to enjoy how naturally she went toe-to-toe with him over the past few days—in her own easy, understated way, she'd never miss a beat. This newfound hesitation of hers totally stilted that. Plus, it was just limiting in general—last night had opened up the veritable floodgates on that roiling little head of hers and this felt like a sudden stopper.

A reactionary slamming of the brakes.

'Forget it ever happened'.

Which didn't bother him, really—he was usually a pretty big fan of that approach—he just…

A brief flicker of that last long, lingering look she'd given him before kissing him goodnight rippled in his head, and his jaw set.

Whatever. He didn't love it.

The door to the bathroom flying open drew him out of his thoughts, and he came to a halt as an oblivious Caroline burst out of it. She looked tense, hair a messy pile of gold atop her head, and when he offered his typical 'Mornin', Locks', she nearly jumped out her skin in shock.

" _Damon_ ," she hissed, clutching her towel against her chest with a white-knuckled grip. "You scared the shit out of me."

"I can be a pretty an intimidating greeter," he conceded, and she rolled her eyes.

"It's not that, I just thought you were—" she caught herself before elaborating and shook her head, shoving a damp lock of hair out of her face, "never mind."

A sly brow slowly ticked upward, and he eased against the wall of the hallway. "Was the sex that bad?"

Her shoulders stiffened. "What?"

"I meeeean, your obviously avoiding Stefan, so—"

"What, _no_ , God—we haven't even…" she waved an agitated hand around before sighing and dropping it, giving her head a firm shake. "I'm not talking about this with you."

He shrugged. "Fine." He eased off the wall and headed to the bathroom, passing her along the way, and he got about a foot from the door before—

"I made him a contract."

His brow furrowed as he glanced over his shoulder. "A _what_?"

"A contract," she gritted out, shrugging irritably. "Like a sex contract. Rules for what we're doing. That kind of thing."

He blinked at her for a few seconds before bursting out laughing.

She ruffled dramatically. "Why does everyone find that so funny?"

"Because it's _apeshit_."

"It's _practical_."

"It's practically _apeshit_."

"Yeah, well no one asked you."

"Why didn't I get a contract?" he asked, feigning offense, and she rolled her eyes.

"You didn't need one."

"Why not?

"Because you understand what 'casual' is without needing it spelled out for you."

"Uh-oh," he said as he eased around to face her, clucking his tongue, "is Steffy bear falling in love already? I thought I was a better influence than this."

She waved a rigid hand. "No one's falling in love."

"Love is in the air."

"Love has nothing to do with this."

"Why do biiiiiirds suddenly appear—"

She pressed her lips together tightly. "Damon."

"—everytiiiiiiiime that you're neeeeee—"

" _No one is falling in fucking love."_

Something about her tone gave him pause. It was harsh. Serious. His brow furrowed a bit, stare raking over her face, and even though it was mostly hardened, there was a notable guardedness to it. She looked unsettled.

He debated saying nothing—it really wasn't any of his business—but after everything that'd gone down the night before, all the fear and uncertainty and vulnerability, ignoring it felt like the wrong move.

Ugh.

When had he made friends.

"Do you want him to sign it?"

Her stare lifted up to his, thinning. "What?"

"The contract—do you want him to sign it or no?"

"I—" she ruffled a bit, "I mean, I don't really care, he can do whatever he wants."

"Okay but, moving past the bullshit answer," he insisted, giving an impatient wave of his hand, and she glared at him for a long, hard beat before balking slightly.

"I don't know." She pushed a stressed hand into her hair. "I mean, I gave him a pretty compelling argument to, which I hadn't really planned on doing, but…" she trailed off, chewing her lip for a seconds. "I'm just worried it's not enough, honestly."

"Why?"

She scoffed. "Have you _met_ Stefan? He's like a real life version of the cheesy lead in every romantic movie. Not sure a few pieces of paper are going to keep him from turning this into something it's not."

He pursed his lips. "So what if they don't?" She frowned at him and he shrugged. "You've made it clear what you're after, he knows what he's getting himself into, so who cares if he ends up getting more invested? No one can blame you for that—just cut it loose if it becomes too much."

She shook her head. "He's Bonnie's best friend, it's not that simple."

He arched a brow. "Is that the only reason?"

Her stare narrowed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It meaaaaans," he began, pushing himself off the doorframe he'd been leaning against to give her a frank look, "are his and Bonnie's feelings the only ones you're worried about?"

She blinked at him. "As opposed to what? _Mine_?" He shrugged and she bristled immediately. "Why would—"

"Just think about it, Locks," he chimed with an air of finality, swiveling back around to the bathroom, and he felt her agitated stare follow him all the way to the sink.

"I liked you better when you didn't do feelings."

He snorted as he splashed some water on his face, reaching out for the toothbrush she'd given him on their first night. "You and me both."

"Then what happened?" she grumbled, and he scrubbed a hand over his face to wipe off the excess water, stare clouding a bit.

 _You're more than you think you are._

"Nothing." He shot her a breezy wink through the mirror. "New day, new fabulous me."

Her lip curled in distaste. "Get a refund."

And with that, she whirled around and disappeared into her room, leaving him alone with his damp reflection. He stared at it for a few seconds, taking in the dark circles hollowing his eyes, the bleary sheen from all the drinking, the sickly pallor from the compounding lack of sleep, and some of the perpetual blitheness drained from his face.

His reflection flickered to one of him at fourteen, grabbing the edges of the sink and riding the high of whatever Katherine had given him earlier that day. His foster mom was screaming at him from the other side of the door, rapping on it viciously, and he barely heard her, thoughts floating, racing mind at glorious peace for the first time in weeks. Just as pale. Just as hollow-eyed.

Just as pointless.

He blinked and snapped himself out of the memory. Nope. No thank you. Not doing this. Feelings were officially cancelled for the day.

He took a few minutes to finish up in the bathroom before heading over to the kitchen, where to his surprise, everyone else was already gathered. Bonnie was sitting cross-legged on the counter with a steaming mug in her hand, a freshly changed Caroline was making herself a green smoothie that looked straight-up radioactive, and Stefan was hovering over the stove all culinary-like.

"Look at that," he said as he breezed into the kitchen, heading for the cabinet with the spare cups, "gang's all here. Reunited and it feels so good."

Caroline's only response was the silencing crash of the blender, and his lips quirked upward—someone was still pissy.

"What are you—"

His stare shifted down to Bonnie as he reached for the cabinet door—it was the one beside her head. She looked apprehensive about his proximity, fingers curled tight around her mug, and his brows slid upward. Seriously? "I'm getting a cup, kid."

"Right." She cleared her throat, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Sorry."

"Can I open the cabinet?"

She shot him a slightly exasperated look. "Yeah." He took care to open it obnoxiously slowly, as if avoiding any sudden movements, and she sighed. "You can open it at a regular human speed."

"Yeah, but that doesn't give me enough time to ease you into a false sense of security so that I can throw you in front of the fridge and have wild sex with you."

She merely stared at him for a few seconds, face entirely frozen, seemingly not catching onto any of the obvious sarcasm, and his brows dove downward. _Wow_.

"Bonnie."

She blinked rapidly. "What?"

"I'm kidding."

She averted her stare, offering a cool nod, and the crash of the blender once again flooded the room. He took advantage of the noise level and leaned in close, voice dropping so that only she could hear him.

"Look, I'm not sure what you think happened last night," he murmured, propping his hand on the other side of her to close the conversation off from the rest of the room, "but I have scratches down my back and a cut on my tongue from a very aggressive, very goal-oriented you, a you I had to literally fight off of me, so this whole predator/prey thing you seem to think we're doing?" His stare raked down her face, intimately close. "Might want to swap the roles."

The blender cut out and he swiftly drew back, swiping a mug from the counter and heading for the coffeemaker. He wasn't sure why her whole wary-eyed routine was irritating him so much, given that they'd never been particularly close, but it was. "Are we out of coffee?" he gasped, lifting the empty coffee pot with an instant look of tragedy, and Stefan held up a cup he'd set aside on the windowsill.

Damon clasped an emotional hand to his heart. "Fly like paper."

Stefan's lips twitched. "High like planes."

"Steffy bear and I are getting married," he announced to the entirely uninterested kitchen as he took the mug from him, wrapping a loose arm around his shoulders. "He cooks, he cleans, he has my coffee ready for me in the mornings—what's not to love?"

He shot Caroline a glittery look over his shoulder and she jammed an entire cucumber into the running blender, homicidal stare locked on his. The phallic imagery wasn't very subtle.

"So what's cookin', good lookin'?" he asked, turning his attention back to the stove and squinting at the colorful array of veggies Stefan was prodding with a spatula.

"A few things were about to expire, so this is kind of an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink frittata."

"Bet the kitchen sink feels a little left out." He shot it an encouraging look. "Don't worry, buddy, you'll make the next one."

Stefan chewed his lip, the corners curling into a bemused smile, and Damon gave him a firm clap on the shoulder before heading to the table and taking a seat. He made to set his cup down but paused just before touching the surface.

"Locks," he called pleasantly, eyeing the wood.

"What?"

"Bleach?" he prompted, and Stefan knocked his elbow against the panhandle in the very picture of smoothness, sending the pan skittering a few inches on the stove.

"Uh, yeah, I—" he cleared his throat, shooting Caroline a furtive look before swiveling around to face him, "I took care of that."

And much to Damon's complete and utter delight, the heavens opened up, light shone through, and a distinctly puzzled Bonnie _finally_ went, "Took care of what?"

Damon leaned back into his chair with an absolutely Cheshire look, hands easing behind his head, and Stefan floundered for a second.

"Damon wanted me to clean the table."

Bonnie frowned. "Why?"

"Yes, why, Stefan?"

Stefan shot him a sharp look and Caroline jumped in to answer. "Because we made hot chocolate last night and ended up making a mess."

Bonnie's brows lifted, skeptical. "So what's the insistence on bleach for?"

He noticed she wasn't directing any of her questions at him even though they were about him, and the nagging, prickling annoyance from earlier returned to his skin.

"He's allergic to marshmallows," Caroline said after a beat, stare slicing over to his as if daring him to disagree. "Didn't want him to have some accidental reaction and die, though honestly," she gave him a frosty smile, "wouldn't be the worst thing."

He clucked his tongue. "After all that great advice I gave you."

She shoved another ill-fated cucumber into the blender and he smiled, taking an innocent sip of his coffee. After a few seconds, though, his stare shifted to the right, where Bonnie was staring at an entirely oblivious Stefan. She was folded up on the countertop like some hypertensive pretzel, petite frame swallowed by the giant sweater she was wearing, and if he wasn't mistaken, there was a distinct look of What Is This Dude Hiding glinting in her eyes.

He took another long sip of his coffee, gaze darkening.

 _Same thing you are, sweetheart._

A knock on the front door cut through the lull in conversation, and they all glanced over to the living room in surprise. Who the hell was at their door in the middle of a—

"Kai," Bonnie said in answer to their unvoiced question. His stare slid back over to hers just as she dropped her head into her hands, lapsing into a groan. "Ugh, of _all days_."

"Let me deal with it," Stefan offered, turning down the gas on the burner. "I can tell him your sick."

"No," she muttered, voice a little muffled. "No, I'd rather just get this over with." She dropped her hands with a sigh and pushed herself off the counter, heading straight to the living room, and Damon arched a brow as she passed him.

"Am I still the overnight love of your life, or…?"

She halted a foot or so from the door, half-turning around to look at him. "What?"

"For the date," he prompted, waving a 'hello' hand. "You were worried about getting dismembered, I offered to be your pretend boyfriend—"

"Right," she cut in, averting her stare, "that—yeah, no, I don't need you to do that anymore."

His brows slid up. "Really?"

"Yeah, I was overreacting, it's fine." She shot him a stiff smile before swiveling around and clearing the kitchen, and he watched her disappear from view before swinging his gaze back around.

Caroline snapped a hand up toward the door. "Go."

"Yeah, I don't know what kind of hangover brain she's on but you're absolutely going with her," Stefan added, and Damon lifted his palms in surrender, hopping to his feet without a fight.

Not that he wanted to go or anything, he just.

You know.

Wasn't about to argue with that.

He emerged into the living room just in time to see a gleeful Kai holding up a lumpy sack and wary Bonnie backing away.

"… _really_ don't need to see that…"

"See what?" he asked in a purposefully throaty voice, as if he'd just woken up, and before Bonnie could protest he eased up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist, pulling her into him. "Mornin', kid."

She went stiff as a board as he kissed her temple. Kai's eyes were narrowed and calculative as he took in the two of them, visibly readjusting some pre-solved equation in his head, and Damon rested his chin atop of her head with a pleasant look. "What's in the bag, Santa?"

"A dead swan."

His brows ticked upward. "Festive." He angled his gaze down to her. "Isn't that festive, babe?"

"Mm-hmm," she said tautly, still a veritable block of concrete against him, and he shot her a fond smile that carried a pretty clear edge of ' _really_ '.

"Are you two—"

"Madly in love?" His sparkling gaze lifted to Kai's. "Yep." Bonnie shifted awkwardly against him and he fought back an eye roll, instead offering a derisive smile. "It's so cute it makes even _us_ cringe."

"Damon, don't you have that thing you need to work on?" she prompted with the all the subtlety of a hand grenade, disentangling herself from his grip.

"Thing?"

"Yeah, you were talking about it all night," she said, turning to face him with a sharp expression. "Your big thing for work?"

"Doesn't ring a bell." He shot Kai a sly look. "Past few nights have been kind of a blur."

"You should go work on it," she insisted, and he snorted as his gaze returned to hers.

"The thing I don't remember?"

"You'll remember it."

"I don't think so."

"Try." Her jaw was set, stare hard, and he merely eyed her for a moment, slightly baffled: did she seriously think braving a night alone with Crossbow McSwanKiller was a better prospect than having to be around him? _Really_? For a second he debated just giving her what she wanted and peacing out, Good Samaritan-hood be damned, but then he caught sight of Caroline standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, stare fixated on him like a laser.

She gave an impatient nod at Kai and he rolled his eyes.

"Look, Kale—"

"It's Malachai."

"Gesundheit—here's the deal: I'm crashing your dinner date."

Kai merely stared at him for a few seconds, blinking in that slow, reptilian way of his, before shrugging. "Cool."

Damon's hands lifted in celebration. "Great."

"I mean, I'll have to hunt some more swan, obviousl—"

"Yeah, you know, I'm actually super allergic to swan," he cut in, sucking air in through his teeth. "Swans and marshmallows. Rare but lethal allergen combo."

Kai hummed thoughtfully. "Peacock, then?"

Damon's eyes fell into a bemused squint. "Have we considered chicken, or—?"

Kai's nose wrinkled. " _Chicken_?"

"Yeah, you know, smallish. Feathers. Sold in actual grocery stores." Kai continued to look unconvinced and Damon waved a venturing hand. "Legal to consume in the United States."

"I guess I could dig some up."

Damon tried not to dwell on the theory that he meant it literally and had buried chicken corpses somewhere in his apartment. "Great."

"But I might have some peacock on standby," Kai mused, "just to be safe."

"You do you, man."

"Awesome sauce. Does 7 o' clock work for you guys?"

He chanced a glance at Bonnie, who'd crossed her arms and wordlessly checked out of the conversation, and his stare thinned in another flare of annoyance. "I mean, I have to finish that work thing of mine that doesn't exist, but I should definitely be done by 7."

Her lips twitched humorlessly at the dig. "Seven's fine."

"Great, then seven it is," Kai said, flashing a pert little grin. "Don't be late."

"We'll try, but you never know with Chatty Cathy over here." He thrust a sardonic thumb at Bonnie, and Kai chuckled good-naturedly.

"No, seriously, don't be late." His stare took on a sharp glint, laughter dying immediately on his tongue. "Tardiness just kinda," he lifted a hand and waved it around his head, face contorting into an unsettling look, "drives me nuts."

Damon eyed him warily. "…right."

"Anyway," he chirped, dropping his hand and lifting the swan bag up in toast, "see you at seven."

"On the dot."

He flounced off merrily, pleasant as can be, and Damon released a breath as he closed the door behind him. Well, _that_ was going to be fun. Speaking of fun—he turned around and was met with a cross-armed, tight-shouldered, stony-faced Bonnie.

"What was that?"

He frowned at the question. "Uh, you're welcome."

"For what, ignoring what I said? I told you I didn't need you to come with me."

"Yeah, and everyone in this apartment knew that was crazy," he countered, nodding at a Stefan and Caroline who were none-too-subtly watching from the kitchen, "so I'm coming with you anyway."

She parted her mouth to say something, something referencing last night from the looks of her expression, but promptly shot a harassed glance at the kitchen. Stefan immediately turned back to the stove, pretending he wasn't listening, and Caroline swiped up a five day old newspaper like it wasn't the most unconvincing move on the planet. "Whatever, just…" she sighed tightly after a few seconds, pushing past him and heading back to her room, "see you at seven."

He watched her with a bewildered look, the same low-burning flare of irritation he'd been feeling all morning prickling his skin—this was the same girl who'd been thanking him half an hour ago. Now it was like she'd decided he'd actually done everything wrong. And while he'd be the first person to tell you he'd hardly been a saint last night, this felt different.

This felt like something else.

And honestly, if she kept pushing it?

He was going to want to find out exactly what it was.

* * *

Caroline wasn't in the habit of subtlety.

Which was likely why she was staring straight out of the kitchen, chin propped against her hand, elbow propped against the newspaper she hadn't so much as glanced at, watching an uncharacteristically touchy Bonnie walk away from a vaguely irritated-looking Damon.

After a few seconds, the latter shook his head and glanced into the kitchen, and Caroline raised her brows in shameless greeting, chewing on her straw.

"I'm stealing your bed," he muttered matter-of-factly, and her brows dove into a frown.

"Uh, no, you're not."

" _Uh_ , yeah, I am."

He began to walk away and she sat up slightly from her chair, ruffled. "Hey, no, you're not! Damon!" She needed her room, she was _avoiding here_ —but he ignored her, disappearing down the hallway with some ain't shit wave.

She let out a sharp sigh, lowering herself back into her seat with a tense expression. Perfect. Now it was just her and Stefan and nowhere to go. She hadn't even meant to stay in the kitchen in the first place—she was supposed to have just made her smoothie and disappeared—but _noooo_. She was too big of a slut for drama.

She shoved her straw back into her mouth, chewing it irritably.

'Cause this was _exactly_ how she wanted to spend the time it'd take Stefan to read through the contract.

Two feet away from him, avoiding his gaze.

"You know, that straw's not actually edible."

She stiffened a bit at the rumble of his voice behind her, releasing the straw. It was annoying how much more intimate it sounded now that it was just the two of them, even though the kitchen was just as big and they were just as far apart as they'd been before.

Possibly because they'd almost had sex there last night but hey, who really knew?

"But if you're looking for something you _can_ eat," he continued, and she could hear the scrape of a spatula against a pan, "I have a giant frittata here and the two main people it was for just disappeared."

She held up her empty smoothie glass without bothering to look behind her. "Already ate."

He snorted. "That's not food."

"Uh, yes, it is—it's blended up food."

"It's blended up cucumbers."

She felt a weird flare of something at the fact that he knew what was in it. Had he been watching her make it? She shook her tightly—why would that mater? "Cucumbers and kale and mint leaves, actually," she corrected, and he scoffed.

"Yeah, that's not a meal."

"It's totally a meal."

"That's a windowsill garden."

Before she could reply with an inspired ' _you're_ a windowsill garden', a plate with a slice of frittata was wordlessly slipped in front of her. She stared at it for a second, struck by a confusing mixture of annoyance and… well, not-quite-annoyance.

"What are you, the witch from Hansel and Gretel?" she grumbled, trying to ignore how good it smelled, and he held out a fork in response. She sighed and finally forced herself to look up at him. "I'm not hungry."

"Then don't eat it."

"I'm not."

"Okay."

"I don't need the fork."

He set it down on the table and lifted his palms in a 'do what you want' gesture, and her eyes briefly narrowed as he waltzed away. He pretended to be all nice and innocent, but he always seemed to know exactly what he was doing.

 _'I'm really not that nice._ '

Yeah, no kidding.

"Hey, when you talked to Bonnie this morning," she began, more to distract herself than anything, "did she seem okay to you?"

"Sure. I mean, guilty, but otherwise good." He walked back over to the table with his own plate and took the seat across from her. "Why, was she off with you?"

"No, she was great," she said, chewing her lip a bit. "But I feel like she's being a little weird around Damon."

His brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Well, he definitely took the worst of her last night. Maybe she feels bad?"

"Mmm," she said, somehow finding her way back to chewing her straw, "not the vibe I'm getting."

"What vibe are you getting?"

She twirled the straw against her lips, eyes thinning speculatively. "A 'something happened that we don't know about' vibe."

He eyed her mouth for a lingering second before dropping his stare to his plate. "I mean," he began, plucking his fork up. "I'm sure some things were said that—"

"Oh, I don't mean talking," she interjected, and his gaze promptly flickered up to hers, fork slowing to a stall.

"What?"

She released the straw. "You really didn't see it earlier?"

"See _what_?"

"Their tension," she said, tone growing a bit clipped with disbelief. "It was super physical."

"Physical _how_?" She shot him a 'really' look and he set his fork down. "Hold on—"

"Jesus Christ, it's like talking to a grandpa."

"—you're saying you think they hooked up last night?"

"No, I'm saying they jazzercized."

His face was dead serious. "She was drunk."

"Yeah, we all were."

"Yeah, but she was—" his jaw tightened a bit, head turning to stare out at the living room, and she realized where his head was going.

"Hey, I'm not saying Damon took advantage of her," she clarified, and his sharp stare shot back to hers. "I'm not getting that vibe at all—and in my experience, Damon's really not like that. He's not into it unless you are."

Stefan stared at her. "So you're saying Bonnie—"

She lifted her hands. "I'm saying there are vibes." He pressed his lips together, only seeming half-convinced. " _And_ , that tequila Bonnie is not someone who's shy about doing and saying whatever the hell she wants."

He held her gaze for a few more seconds before dropping it to his plate, fingers flickering into a restless drum against the table. "Well, if that's the case, I guess we're the last two people allowed to judge."

And just like that, their recent history came right back into focus, slipping into the air between them. It was strange, how easily (albeit briefly) it'd disappeared, given the fact that there was a literal sex contract pending between them. She'd assumed that would've been hanging over any conversation they tried to have until he made a decision.

After a few seconds, he lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck, lips pursing. "Are we…" he began, hesitating a bit, and she arched a brow. "I mean, do we have a timeline for..." he caught her impatient stare after a few seconds and dropped his hand, hitting her with a frank look. "When are we going to tell her about us?"

She tensed at the way he said 'us', like it was some clearly defined, meaningful thing that had permanence. The levity quickly drained from her mood. "That's all in the contract."

"Well, seeing as it's been a bit of an eventful morning, can you summarize it for me?" he said with a glint of amusement, and she merely blinked at him.

"I'd really prefer if you read it there." His easy expression sobered a bit, catching onto her shift in mood, and she averted her stare. "I just chose the words really carefully and stuff, so—"

"I get it," he assured her, lifting his hands. "No problem."

"Great."

The silence that followed was a bit awkward, stiff with the reminder that at the end of the day, they really weren't friends, and after a few seconds, she scraped her chair back. "Well, I'm going to get some laundry done."

He nodded, spearing a bit of frittata onto his fork. "And I've clearly got some reading to do." She shot him a clipped smile, reaching for the untouched plate he'd given her to wrap it up, and he lifted a hand. "Don't worry about it, I'll put it away."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I have to clean up this mess anyway."

 _Do not offer to help._

"I mean, I can help you, if you want."

 _Really_?

"Caroline," he said, voice taking on a dry lilt, "go do laundry."

"Right." She whirled around and made her way out of the kitchen, en route to the bathroom—she kept her hamper there, so theoretically, it was where her laundry would be.

You know, if she actually had any.

Unfortunately, she didn't, so out of the goodness of her heart and not at all an irrational need to avoid Stefan Salvatore for the next few hours, she was just going to do Bonnie's.

I mean, what were friends for.

* * *

 **A/N:** _This was supposed to be a quick, transitional 7,000 word chapter and all I have are apologies, tbh._

 _Sincerely, Every Editor's Nightmare._


	14. Two's Company

**Six Mornings After**

 _Chapter Fourteen: Two's Company_

* * *

 ** _Section 2, Article IV: Kissing_**

 _Kissing will be engaged in exclusively as a form of foreplay (with sex as the intended target)._

Stefan dropped the pen he'd been twirling in his fingers to scratch out the parenthetical part, scrawling a quick 'redundant' in his jagged handwriting before resuming the motion.

 _While permitted in typical erogenous zones (i.e. mouth, thighs, neck, etc), kisses in the following areas are not permitted: nose, forehead, hand, temple, eyelids._

He lowered the pen again to switch the 'i.e.' to 'e.g.', the corner of his mouth taking on a curl—it was a nitpicky edit and he knew it'd annoy her.

 _Kisses in the following areas should be used sparingly and explicitly non-intimate in nature: shoulder, ear, cheek._

He circled the term 'non-intimate' and wrote 'clarify' over it, and just as he lifted the pen back up into an absent spin, a blunt drawl came from behind him.

"Is that your sex contract?"

His pen went flying out of his fingers, head whipping around to look over his shoulder: Damon was leaning against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over his chest and mouth crooked beneath a glinting blue gaze.

Stefan shot him a harassed look. "You want to say it a little louder for the people on the top floor?"

"Sure: _IS THAT YOUR SE—"_

 _"_ Damon!" Stefan cut in, strained, and Damon lapsed into a snort, pushing himself off the frame and waltzing into the kitchen.

"I smell coffee."

Stefan settled back into his seat with a tired sigh, wiping a hand over his face—this whole Bonnie-not-knowing-about-him-and-Caroline thing was really starting to stress him out. He felt like any second something (Damon) was going to out them, and although he hadn't explicitly lied about anything, it'd still feel like being caught in one. "You guys are all caffeine addicts," he muttered, dropping his hand to the table, and Damon shot him a breezy look.

"The only thing I'm addicted to is you, Steffy bear."

He poured himself a cup of coffee from the fresh pot Bonnie had begged for earlier and settled himself into the seat across from Stefan, legs kicking up to prop over the corner of the table.

Stefan arched a brow. "Whatever happened to 'I eat here'?"

"This is different," Damon said, taking a sip of his coffee and shooting him a pleasant look from over the rim. "Less bodily fluids."

Stefan's eyes closed—why did he walk right into these things?

"So, anything good in here?" His stare flew open at the sharp whoosh of paper accompanying Damon's voice. "'Cause the reading material in this apartment is crap."

He was leaning back into his chair, all entitlement and ease, perusing the stolen contract with a lazy look.

"Wha— _Damon_ ," Stefan growled, surging out of his seat and reaching across the table for the stack, and Damon held it out of his range, squinting at the words.

"She only wants to be kissed in certain places?" he snorted, and Stefan abandoned his chair and circled around the table. "That's new."

He snatched the contract away from him with a frustrated sigh, though he stilled after a moment, processing the comment. _That's new._ As in, she hadn't been like that with Damon. So… Damon used to kiss her everywhere. The unexpected reminder of their history made him stiffen a bit. He didn't know why—it wasn't like he hadn't known about it or anything, he'd just… it'd always felt abstract to him. Vague. Caroline and Damon used to hook up. Cool. Whatever.

But something about Damon explicitly referencing what she'd been like with him, what she'd let him do with her and where, just made it all feel a lot… realer. Like suddenly it wasn't just a random bit of trivia, it was an actual thing. A thing that'd involved real hands and real mouths. A thing that was really no different from their thing.

Actually, it was different—theirs was longer. He didn't know much about it, but Bonnie had been complaining about Damon for at least a month, so he obviously wasn't a one-off thing. And it'd gone on up to as recently as a few days ago, so—

His face drew into a sharp furrow.

It struck him that he didn't actually know if they'd ended it.

Like he'd assumed they had, given him and Caroline's newfound whatever and the fact that Damon seemed so chill with egging them on, but he didn't actually know for sure.

His brows dove downward—nah. It wouldn't make sense—he never saw them being—they were just—they always seemed so—but then again they were both—his jaw tightened, blood buzzing a bit.

It was possible.

Damon knew about the contract, which meant Caroline must've told him about it, so obviously they were close enough to talk about that kind of stuff. And they'd been absurdly in sync during Heads Up and Never Have I Ever, which seemed strange for two people with no attachment to each other.

Besides, wasn't that exactly what casual meant? No strings? No exclusivity? She'd certainly hammered that out in their agreement, he just hadn't really thought it'd apply until after they left the apartment. But would she—would they really—I mean, it was fine, she could do whatever the hell she wanted, he just—

"Bro."

His distracted gaze snapped back into focus and Damon arched an amused brow.

"I know I'm pretty, but this stare-off's getting a little intense."

Stefan blinked. "I—sorry." He shoved a hand in his hair and turned around, walking back over to his seat.

It didn't matter.

Really, it didn't.

Just a little incestuous, honestly, but hey, what did he know about how this whole lifestyle worked?

He plucked his pen off the floor as he sat back down to resume editing, movements a little stilted, and after a few unfocused seconds of staring at the page, his jaw ticced again. When would they have even had the time? The past few days had been pretty chaotic, and cramming four people in a tiny apartment hardly left any room for privacy. Then again, him and Caroline had managed to lie pretty low, so why couldn't her and Damon do the same?

He thought of the day he'd spent working in the laundry room—they'd downed a whole tray of Jell-O shots and gotten drunk together. And that night she'd kissed him before breaking down in the hallway—maybe she'd been on her way to wake up Damon and just ran into him first. His fingers grew a little stiff around the pen he was spinning, moving faster and faster until it flipped out of his hand and hit the table with a clatter.

Damon shot him a strange look and he ignored it, straightening in his seat with a low sigh—okay. This was stupid. Caroline could do whatever and whoever she wanted: he had no problem with that. I mean, _obviously—_ he was halfway through reading a sex contract that all but banned human emotion, and so far all it'd done was make him laugh. Casual was totally fine. Non-exclusivity made total sense.

He was just… new to this.

He drummed edgy fingers against the table.

"Hey, Stef?"

The muffled sound of Bonnie's approaching voice made him flip the contract over and flatten it against the table—a distraction was exactly what he needed. "Yeah?" he called over his shoulder.

"Remember that super weird concert Lexi dragged us to where there were like malfunctioning animatronic circus animals onstage?"

His brow furrowed at the throwback. "You mean way back in middle school?"

"Yeah," she said, the sudden clearness of her voice indicating she'd reached the doorway, and he shot an amused look over his shoulder.

"Mr. Bungle." She didn't react to the answer, stare fixed somewhere past him, and after an extended beat, his brows gathered. "Bon."

"Mm?" Her gaze flitted back over to his, distracted.

"The concert was Mr. Bungle."

"Right," she said, snapping of her momentary daze. "Yeah, I knew it was Mr. Something."

His stare took on a baffled glitter. "What even brought that up?"

"Oh, I was just…" she waved a hand, stare gradually veering past him again, "looking for some new music…"

"You hated Mr. Bungle."

"Hmm?" Her stare flicked back to his. "No, I didn't."

"You whined about having nightmares for like two weeks."

"Really?"

Off went the stare, a slow, magnetized slide just to the left of him, and after a few puzzled seconds, he realized she was looking at Damon. He glanced over his shoulder: Damon was staring back at her, brows lifted, blowing on his coffee.

And suddenly he saw what Caroline had been talking about earlier.

The… vibes, or whatever she'd called it.

He'd seen them yesterday, too, before everything had taken a massive nosedive, but he'd figured it was just a drunk Bonnie thing. Given the way she was looking at him now, though, he was pretty sure it wasn't.

His stare slowly thinned, measuring Damon a bit more critically: he realized there was a legit possibility he was involved with both Caroline and Bonnie at the same time right now, which, his own feelings about it aside, was just… what? Who _was_ this guy? Did Caroline and Bonnie both know about it? Was everyone cool with that? Was he the only person who found it weird?

Honestly, what the hell was even happening in this apartment?

"I'm going to go…" Bonnie waved a jerky hand over her shoulder, "…do things now."

She whipped around and disappeared into the living room, awkward as all hell, and he couldn't help but feel like that wasn't the reaction of someone who was totally cool with a situation. His attention once again found itself settling on Damon, who'd lifted his phone back up to keep browsing through it. He sensed Stefan's stare after a few seconds and didn't bother glancing up.

"Yes, dear?"

"Did something happen last night?" He'd considered being a little subtler, but from what he knew about Damon, it didn't seem necessary.

Unsurprisingly, Damon's lips twitched. "Pretty sure lots of things happened last night." He dropped a hand to the table and gave it a slight pat. "Right, table?"

"I mean with Bonnie," Stefan said pointedly, ignoring the flare of warmth that shot through him at the taunt. "You and Bonnie. When you were alone."

Damon met his stare and held it for a little too long. "Any particular reason you're asking me this and not her?"

Stefan shrugged. "You're here."

"And she's twenty feet away."

Stefan's brows drew in at the evasion. "Any particular reason you wouldn't _want_ me to ask you this?"

Damon held his gaze for a long beat before dropping it back to his phone. "I didn't sleep with your bestie, Steffy bear."

Stefan's stare was fixed. "You sure?"

"Pretty sure," Damon drawled, scrolling down the screen with a bored look, and Stefan felt a flicker of irritation at his body language. He was relaxed, disinterested—likely sifting through Tinder for something more interesting to think about.

"Look," Stefan began in a warning voice, leaning forward and clasping his hands against the table, "if you did something last night and you're just trying to cover your own ass _—_ "

" _Whoaaaa_ ," Damon interjected, stare flicking up as he lifted a disbelieving hand, "slow down before you trip over one on those conclusions you're jumping to, buddy."

"Bonnie's been acting weird around you all morning," Stefan countered, pointblank. "She's fine with me and Caroline, but you walk into the room and she can't leave it fast enough."

Damon's jaw ticced a bit.

"Not to mention, I mean," he gestured at him with a scoff, distantly aware that he was getting personal, "you're not exactly the most innocent guy in the world, so—"

"—so I'd have no problem taking advantage of a shit-faced, emotionally compromised girl after promising her two best friends I'd make sure she was okay?" Damon's stare was sharp on his, countenance frank. At Stefan's silence, his shoulders lifted. "Is that about the gist of it?"

Stefan felt a flicker of guilt at the phrasing. "I—" he pressed his lips together, jaw tightening a bit. "That's not what I meant."

It kind of was, though, and they both knew it. A tense silence stretched between the two of them before Damon sighed, pushing his chair back.

"Look, if you want details about last night," he said, voice thin and tired, "ask Bonnie—but what I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt is that I didn't sleep with her." He got to his feet and swiped up his mug. "As for why she's suddenly treating me like I'm the bad guy this morning, I have no idea, but apparently it's a trend, so." He toasted his mug with a wink before walking off. "Thanks for the coffee, bud."

Stefan sighed. "Damon, I didn't—"

"Don't worry about it, Steffy bear, I'm used to a low bar."

Stefan heard the footsteps disappear behind him before slumping a bit in his seat, hand lifting to rub the back of his neck.

Shit.

That was not how he'd wanted that to go.

He pressed his lips into a resigned line, dropping his hand to flip through the pages of the contract before pushing it away a little gruffly. That wasn't how he'd wanted that to go at all. Damon hadn't deserved that. He'd definitely meant to bring up the Bonnie thing in some capacity, so he wasn't sorry about the principle of it, but he'd be lying to himself if he said the way he handled it had nothing to do with something else.

Something he'd felt the second he'd realized Damon might still be with Caroline.

It was just… there.

Back.

The feeling.

Quiet and dim, simmering, prickling—an old, irrelevant anger that lifted the hairs on his skin the second it found the slightest opening to seep out of. The situations were wildly different. They basically had nothing in common. Caroline didn't owe him anything, and even if she did, she hadn't done anything she wasn't supposed to do—hell, he didn't even know if she was doing anything at all.

He understood all of that.

But that stiff moment of realization, of figuring out that the way he saw things was naïve, that he'd somehow built a different reality in his head—it brought him right back to Elena. Stupidly. Irrationally. The stakes were radically different, the scopes were orders of magnitude apart, but the feeling surged up his veins regardless, transporting him right back to the paralyzing moment when he'd walked in on her and Liam, when the world froze, when he felt himself crack in half.

He dropped his head against his palm, dragging a tired splay of fingers over his features.

Maybe…

He let out a thin sigh.

Maybe this whole thing with Caroline wasn't such a good idea.

Maybe he wasn't ready for it.

He scoffed aloud, acknowledging the patheticness of that—it'd been three years and he wasn't ready for a no-strings-attached fling with a wildly attractive girl who had no interest in starting any kind of long-term relationship with him. That should've been the ideal. It was like a paint-by-numbers situation for getting over a breakup. But he just…

Could he really trust himself to keep it that way? To stay objective, to see Caroline for what she was, to resist the urge to transfer old feelings onto a new template? He'd been confident about it this morning, but after going after Damon like that, he just…

His stare drifted down the table to the contract, stare weary and thin, and after a few seconds, it hardened.

No.

You know what?

Enough.

Enough Elena, enough putting his life on pause, enough hesitation—he could absolutely do this. He swiped up the contract and uncapped the pen with his teeth, holding it up in front of him with a dogged look.

No-strings-attached, meet Stefan Salvatore.

* * *

Bonnie squinted at her closet with her lip between her teeth, brow furrowed, arms crossed, trying to determine what outfit said 'hey neighbor how's it going you're not slicing me into pieces tonight also this is my new ain't shit boyfriend who I'm spastically avoiding it's all super normal we brought canapés'.

Weirdly, she didn't have a ton of experience with that dress code.

She grabbed a cropped black sweater that said 'NOPE' on it in big, blocky white letters and held it up. _Eh._ A little too on-the-nose. She flung it onto her bed with an absent flick of her wrist, letting it join the steadily growing pile of rejects that was starting to spill onto her floor. Honestly, it felt like ages since she'd had to put on real clothes and she kind of felt like she'd forgotten how to be a normal person.

Not that going over to Kai's for dinner required any normalcy.

She whirled around with a sigh, right foot lifting into the instinctive, lazy beginnings of a pirouette—she needed to kill time. Murder it. Violently. Because any time she wasn't killing was time her brain was free to wander, and at the moment, it was magnetized to a certain svelte, glittery-eyed headache with a knack for getting under her skin.

And, you know, other parts of her.

She realized she was being unfair to him. About the dinner, about him inviting himself—she knew he was just trying to do the right thing, that her desire to go alone must've seemed insane, she'd just…

Her hands curled into loose fists, lips pressing together.

She'd just really been looking forward to having some space.

Some alone time to sweat this out.

It was her routine, how she processed things, how she got over them, and the fact that he was not only going to be right up in her face, but pretending to be her _boyfriend_? It was a disaster waiting to happen. She'd heated up like six thousand degrees when he'd wrapped his arms around her to put on a show for Kai, easing her against him all smiles and charm.

She could still feel the ridges of him pressed up against her back.

In any case, she just needed to avoid him for the next few hours. Keep busy, distract herself—hell, she'd even tried blasting that Mr. Batshit band to see if it'd get as stuck in her head as it had after that concert, but nope, bust. In fact, all she'd gotten out of that interaction was Damon staring her down as he blew his coffee while she imagined what it'd feel like for him to blow against something else.

A more mature person would probably just be upfront about the situation. Tell him what was going on, where her head was at, apologize for the weirdness, whatever, but she was still convinced that was more trouble than it was worth. She could wait it out. Hell, maybe all the weirdness would be gone before seven.

A girl could dream.

She sighed gustily and made her way over to her window, bracing her hands against the ledge. The glass was caked in ice, the falling snow barely visible in the fading afternoon light, but she could still make it out. Sheets of it, thick and merciless, coating the world in white. No lull. No end in sight. Just more and more snow.

She scowled, making to turn around when her eye caught on something—gleaming and black, luxurious, out of place against the dulling fabric of her threadbare armchair. She frowned, reaching out to grab it, and her face loosened as she brought it back up to inspect—it was a wallet. The leather was sleek and buttery against her fingers, the corner embossed with some kind of swanky lettering, and her brows quirked a bit.

A really fancy wallet.

Thoughtlessly, she flipped it open, and the immediate picture of Damon in the ID solved the mystery of who it belonged to. It must've fallen out of his pocket last night. Kind of weird that he was sleeping with it, though—why did he even have it on him?

She shot a brief, measuring glance over her shoulder, as if her empty room that no one had walked into might somehow not be empty anymore, before shifting her stare back down. She shouldn't snoop. She should just put it back—or better yet, she should go find Damon and give it back to him. Instead, she thumbed the ID out of the clear slot and plucked it out, bringing it up to her eyes to read it. There were a lot of shoulds she wasn't acting on today—what was one more?

 _Damon John Whitmore._

She realized she'd had no idea what his last name was. _Whitmore_. She'd kind of expected something a little more unique, a little less country club-y, but it suited him well enough.

 _6/21/1989._

She realized she'd also had no idea how old he was. She'd suspected he was a few years older, though, so twenty-seven wasn't really a surprise.

He lived in the Theater District. Huh. She would've pegged him for a Copley kind of guy, but come to think of it, she could definitely picture him wading through Chinatown like a regular, busting out in casual Mandarin like it was nothing.

The rest was mundane—5'11, blue eyes, organ donor—so she went to put it back, curious as to what else she might find. And that's when she noticed the second ID. It was in the same spot as the first one, presumably slipped in right behind it, and for a second, she thought it was just a copy. A lost one he'd found, or an expired one he had yet to throw away—God knows her wallet was a mess of stuff she hadn't had a chance to clean out.

But something about it felt wrong. One glance at the state of his wallet was enough to know it was pristine—the cards were perfectly centered, one per slot, no doubles shoved in anywhere else, no crumpled receipts sticking out from any edges, the cash a crisp, clean stack of bills in the proper pocket. She didn't even hear any change jingling. So she slid the second ID out and brought it up to her eyes, peering at the info.

 _Damon James Fell._

 _10/13/1989._

She blinked. What?

She hurriedly scanned the rest of the information, keen to see if there were any other changes, but it was identical. Even the picture was the same—a distracted half-smile, sharp eyes a little impatient, hair cropped shorter than it was now. Her stare flicked back up to the name and birthday.

Why the hell did he have the same ID with two different names and birthdays on them? Whitmore? Fell? October? June? Which ones were real?

A sudden thought struck her—were any of them real?

"Okay," she murmured to herself, holding up her free hand in a halting gesture, "chill, Caroline Forbes." There was probably a totally reasonable explanation for this. Whitmore was the ID on top, so that was probably the real one, and Fell was just… a fake he'd used back in college.

But then why would it have the same picture as his current license?

Maybe it was a fake he used to buy drugs or something.

Why would he need an ID to buy drugs, though?

Maybe it was a work thing.

But like what was he, a friggin' spy?

She shook her head after a second, slipping both of the IDs back in the plastic slot—this is what she got for being a nosy asshole. As if Damon hadn't already been taking up enough mental real estate, now she had to factor in this? She told herself she didn't care, that she wasn't going to dwell on it or make a big deal out of it, but she still searched the rest of his wallet for any clues.

There was nothing out of the ordinary. A few fancy credit cards, a gym membership, a frequent flyer number, a business card for a dry cleaning place in Chinatown—all of which confirmed that Whitmore was his real last name, or at least, the one he used in his everyday life. She couldn't be really sure what was 'real'.

Gingerly, she flipped the wallet shut, staring down at it with a furrowed look. She felt strange, struck by the realization of how little she knew about him. The night before had almost given her the illusion of familiarity, of an odd kind of intimacy where they knew guarded things about each other, but really, he was still a total stranger to her.

She thought of this morning, the way he'd jolted when she'd kicked him awake, the momentary wildness in his eyes. She thought of last night, what he'd said about his parents, of the bullet wound he'd shown her on his shoulder—he'd said it was from a drug bust.

She suddenly felt even stupider about indulging in all these shallow fantasies about him, for losing herself in all the physical stuff.

Forget the physical.

Who even _was_ he?

A sudden clatter at her window made her jump—what the _everloving…_

She leaned forward, heart hammering in her chest, and squinted out the window: there was some kind of dark shadow hovering on the other side, blurred by the sheet of ice. Was—was that a—

A knock pounded on the door, hasty and loud, and she jumped again, whirling around with a hand pressed to her chest—Jesus _Christ_. " _What_?" she bit out, body pumping adrenaline, and the door flew open to reveal none other than the international man of mystery himself, Damon Question Mark.

Wearing nothing but a towel.

A towel held up only by the loose, distracted fist gathered at his hip.

Literally _what_ had clothes done to him to make him hate them so much?

"Are you finding yourself in the middle of a friggin' Hitchcock movie," he demanded, pushing the sopping wet hair off his forehead, "or is it just me?"

She merely blinked, stare raking down the slick, carved-out length of him for a second before snapping back up. "What?"

"Birds," he snapped, waving a frustrated hand around. "Kamikaze keeps sending them over—a messenger dove just attacked me in the goddamn shower."

Her superficial daze broke a bit—Kai was sending _what_?—but before she could say anything, his eyes caught on something and he began striding over. _Ohhhh_ , no. No, no, no, she did _not_ need naked Damon coming at her right now, no siree, not today, no way Jos—

Her defensive stance fell as he pushed right past her, opting for the window instead. Oh. Well, okay. He snapped the locks open with an irritated flick and wrenched it open, and a chaotic whirl of wind and snow immediately blew into her room. "Hey!" she said, recoiling from the icy onslaught. "What are you—"

"What the hell do you want?" he yelled out the window, surrounded by a flurry of snow and scowling at seemingly nothing. "Go away! Fuck off! Shoo!" He waved a harassed hand outside and she merely stared at him. That was it. He was insane. It all made sense. The multiple IDs, the hesitation to talk about his life—he'd escaped from some high security prison and he'd been on the run for months and all this time he'd been keeping it lowkey but now he'd finally snapped and—

She shrieked when a blur of black shot in through the window, ducking to avoid getting hit—what the _hell_ was that?

"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," Damon growled, whirling around and swiping up a pillow from her chair. "I will fuck your day up, crow!"

" _Crow_?" Bonnie repeated, wide stare snapping up from her duck, and sure enough, there a giant ass crow streaking around her room. "Wha— _why is there a crow in my room!?"_

Damon scoffed angrily as he set off after it. "Same reason there was a pigeon in the kitchen and a dove in the shower—your neighbor's a lunatic!" He jumped up to try and smack it with the pillow as it flew past him and somehow, even in the midst of pure aviary chaos, her stare dropped to catch the slip of his towel.

She wasn't proud of it.

"How do you know Kai's sending them?" she asked, shaking her head sharply to clear it, and he shot her a baffled look as he climbed onto her bed.

"Do you usually have random ass birds flying into your apartment!?"

"I mean, no, but maybe they're lost, or—" she shrieked as the crow came barreling toward her, snapping her arms up to cover her face. She felt something sharp scrape her wrist, and then after a few moments, the flutter of wings vanished, leaving only the sound of the wind behind. She slowly lowered her arms.

It was gone.

Her harassed gaze swung over to Damon, who'd hopped off the bed and was heading over to her. "What the hell just happened?"

"I already told you," he scoffed, coming to halt a foot or so away, "your neighbor's apeshit." He closed the window and bent down to grab something, emerging with a furled piece of paper.

Her brows dove into a frown. Was that a _note_?

Damon flattened the scrap with his fingers and read it briefly. "Kaleidoscope wants us to know that he's adding flamingo to the menu."

She grabbed his hand and angled it so she could read the cramped handwriting.

 _Heya, lovebirds! Just a quick update that I'll be adding flamingo tarts to tonight's selection, so if you were thinking of bringing some, no need!_

"Guess we need to come up with a new appetizer."

"Why is he sending over messenger birds?" she demanded, releasing his hand to push back the mess of curls that's fallen into her face. "He can literally walk over in thirty seconds."

"Yeah, but where's the fun in that?" he drawled, and to her surprise, he took her wrist in his hand, causing the hair to fall right back in her eyes. She immediately tensed at the feeling of his fingers against her skin. "Yikes," he muttered, turning her hand a bit to get a better look at it, and she glanced down.

There was a dark scrape welting across her wrist.

A flare of anger shot through her—perfect. 'Cause getting rabies from some psychotic pet crow was exactly what she needed to add to her day.

A low hum began slipping over the air between them as he inspected her hand, warming it despite the lingering bite of the cold, and after a few moments, she pulled her wrist back. "It's fine," she said, though just as she went to take a step back and reestablish some sort of breathing room between them, her gaze caught on his chest. Or more specifically, the elaborate array of scratch marks spread out over it. Her doctor-mode instinctively activated as she drew in a sharp breath. "Are those from the birds?"

"What?" He glanced down to follow her gaze. "Oh, yeah—fun-fact: doves are _really_ mean."

"Damon," she scolded, alarmed—he was basically a walking risk of infection, "you need to clean those."

"Eh, I used some of Caroline's fancy French shampoo on it, I'm sure it's—" his voice faltered a bit as she ran a hand over his chest, leaning forward to get a closer look. How deep did those lacerations even go? God, he'd better not need stitches—she was not in the headspace for casual suturing right now. "…fine."

"It's definitely not fine," she countered, zeroing in on a particularly deep scrape. It wasn't bad enough for stitches, but it still needed to be dressed. "You need to disinfect these and cover a few of them—these two, at the very least." She tapped a finger above the two cuts that looked the worst, expression drawn and serious, and after a thick beat of silence, she glanced up.

He was just staring down at her, unsettlingly close, eyes curious and a little glinting.

She felt her skin start to heat up under the look, the tension she'd momentarily forgotten about flooding right back over her. "What?"

His shoulders eased up. "You're just awfully close, is all."

She averted her stare. "And?"

" _And,_ does this mean you're done being freaked out by me, or…"

She felt the heat begin to pool in her cheeks. Fuck. "I'm not freaked out by you, I'm just…"

His brows slowly lifted as she cast around aimlessly. "Just…?"

"You're—" she waved a vague hand at him. "I'm… things…"

His expression inverted into a furrow. "I'm. You're." His voice was a musing deadpan. "Things."

"Damon," she muttered, a little exasperated, and he didn't budge, gaze fixed on hers.

"What am I missing here, kid?"

She merely stared at him for a long, loaded second, realizing this was probably her chance to come clean. They were alone, the date hadn't started, neither had pissed the other off yet—it was as good a time as any to start being an adult. _Ugh,_ it was just so much easier not to be, though…

"It's really nothing, just," she waved an absent hand, trying to decide whether to be honest or not, "I'm kind of…"

She trailed off as he intercepted the hand she'd been gesturing with, lifting it up to stare at it.

It took her exactly two seconds to realize it was holding his wallet.

* * *

"…just saying, it wouldn't be the worst thing for you to get back out there—"

"Caroline."

"I'm serious, Mom," Caroline said, propping the phone between her ear and shoulder to free up both her hands, "the clock's ticking—you've got to seize the day while you're still a hot blonde cop."

"Oh, my God."

"Don't oh my God me," she tutted, shaking out a pair of Bonnie's jeans before folding them in half. "Mr. Brenner's a stone cold fox—go on the date."

Her mom chuckled on the other end of the line. "He's a middle school gym teacher."

" _Fox_."

"Your brother'll have a heart attack."

"Perfect—win-win."

"Caroline."

"Mother."

Her mom heaved a gusty sigh, amusement brightening the sound, and Carline's lips twitched as she put the jeans in one of the millions of piles she was surrounded by. "Where did I go wrong with you?"

"Having Kol."

"It's Christmas, can you try to be nice?"

"God, as if he has any room to get mad over you dating," she persisted as she swiped up a T-shirt, completely ignoring the request. "He's sexed up half of Texas."

"Really didn't need that visual."

"Well, I really didn't need the visual of him dry-humping Liv at my ninth-grade sleepover, but here we are."

Her mom snorted. "That was ten years ago."

"Feels like yesterday."

"Ooookay, hon."

"Is he back yet?" Caroline ventured, folding the shirt into a perfect series of squares before setting it atop her T-shirt stack.

"No, he had a late final so he's driving home tomorrow."

She scoffed. "Probably skipped it to party and now he's taking a make-up."

"Caroline."

"Blah, Christmas, niceness, got it," she drawled, rolling her eyes, and she could practically see her mom's apple-cheeked face glinting with exasperation.

"So what about you?" she asked after a beat, and Caroline frowned, picking up a pair of sweatpants.

"What about me?"

"Anyone I should be expecting you to bring home this year?"

She let out a dry laugh. "Hilarious."

"Oh, so you get to hound me about dating but I can't do the same to you?"

Caroline's face crumpled. "I date all the time."

"Yeah, Federicos and Fabios and Ferraris—"

Caroline burst out laughing. "What does that even _mean_?"

"You know, like..." her mom cast around for a second, humor texturing her voice, "like fancy male models and racecar drivers and—"

"Okay, one," Caroline cut in, setting down the sweatpants with a grin, "a Ferrari is a race _car_ , not a racecar driver. Two, I think you think my life's a lot more glamorous than it is."

"Oh, come on, honey, you know what I mean," she said, and Caroline's eyes veered ceiling-ward. "Every time I talk to you, you're seeing some actor or trust fund banker whose name you can barely remember."

"And?"

"And," her mom began, hesitating a bit, and Caroline pressed her lips together in anticipation of what was coming, "you know, I'm just wondering if maybe it's time to… try something a little more serious. If you're ready," she appended quickly, and Caroline chewed the inside of her cheek, the name 'Matt' hanging unsaid between them like a cocked gun. "If not, then psh, screw it, you know? Date all the Ferraris you want."

Her face loosened at the words. "Again, a car."

"Well whatever, date cars, cars are great," her mom said, and Caroline lapsed into a chuckle. "They're reliable, they take you places—"

"They have an off switch."

"Exactly."

They slipped into a shared laugh just as a knock sounded on Caroline's door—Bonnie had said she'd be coming by to pick up her laundry. "Hey, I've actually got to go, Mom."

"Alright, love you, sweetie."

"Love you, too."

"Stay safe up there."

"Jump Mr. Brenner's bones."

Her mom sighed. "Caroline—"

"Byeeeeeee."

She hung up the call with a grin and dropped her phone, reaching out for something else to fold. "It's open," she called out, holding up a hideous pair of overalls and grimacing—Bonnie _really_ needed to clean out her closet. She heard the door open and close behind her, followed by a faint shuffle of footsteps, and she shook her head as she stared at the bedazzled jean fabric. "Bon, I can't in good conscience let you keep these."

"Oh, she'd never get rid of those."

She jumped a bit at the unexpected sound of Stefan's voice, head shooting around to look over her shoulder. He was leaning against her desk a few feet away, arms crossed and mouth tipped into a subtle diagonal. Her stare flicked down to the stack of papers in his hand and shoulders tensed a bit.

She still hadn't figured out what answer she was after.

"I'm thinking I might make them mysteriously disappear from her laundry," she said after a stilted beat, more to stall than anything, and he raked a glance over the immaculate clothing stacks piled around her. "Kind of a friends-don't-let-friends situation."

He lips flickered. "Big of you." A brief silence fell over them, scored by the oddly judgmental tick of her wall clock, before he gave the contract a loose wave. "Is now a bad time for this, or—"

"No," she said, taking care to make her voice sound lighter than she felt. "Not at all—now's fine." She dropped her hands down to push herself up but he waved her off, making his way over and dropping down to the floor across from her. He folded his legs in a mirror of her position, knees a few feet away from hers, and for a second, she just took in the sight of his tall, gangly frame all pretzeled up in the tiny remaining sliver of floor space, surrounded by mini-skyscrapers of clothes.

It was a little more endearing than it needed to be.

He held out the stack like he was offering a handshake—firm, business-like, and she noted his general countenance seemed a little more detached than usual. "Here."

She steeled herself for a second before taking it from him. She hoped he'd signed it. She hoped he hadn't signed it. She had no idea which one she hoped for more, but she was about to find out either way. She shot him a stiff smile before flipping to the last page.

And then it promptly inverted into a frown. The place she'd left for his signature was crossed out, and he'd drawn out a new place underneath it with two blanks and a revision date. His signature was on one of the lines, and the other had a 'Promisor Signature' written in print underneath. "What is this?"

"Counter-offer." Her stare flicked up to his—he had his hands clasped loosely, elbows propped against his knees. "I made some edits."

"Edits," she repeated slowly, surprised, and his brows slid upwards.

"You didn't think you'd get a law student to sign a contract without a negotiation, did you?"

Actually, that was exactly what she'd thought.

"'Course not," she said instead with a wildly unconvincing look, dropping her stare back to the contract and thumbing through the pages—they were covered in red ink. "That'd be… dumb…"

Her eyes zeroed in on an entire section he'd circled and written 'expound' over in blocky red letters, and she felt her proud perfectionist streak slowly starting to flare. She'd spent two hours on that section. How much more expounding was she supposed to do?

"Problem?" he ventured after a few seconds, and she blinked a few times, attempting to neutralize her expression.

"Nope, just…" her eyes slitted as they scanned over comments like 'redundant', 'needs clarification', and 'contradictory' further down the page—contradictory her ass. Maybe she should clarify where her friggin' door was and that she couldn't care less if it redundantly hit him on the way ou—

 _Caroline_ , she said to herself, taking a centering breath, _you wanted him to take it seriously. You asked for this. Chill._

"Just...?" he prompted, and she forced a quick smile as she met his gaze.

"Just a little unsure about what some of these notes mean."

He waved a casual hand. "That's what I'm here for."

Her smile tightened. "Right."

He eyed her for a second before tipping his head forward in an expectant look. "So…"

"So this section," she said, trying to keep her voice light as she lowered the stack between them and pointed to the 'expound' comment. "What exactly needs to be expounded upon? I mean," she slipped into an airy little laugh that probably wasn't fooling anyone, "the list is sixty-seven items long."

"It's definitely… thorough," he said, and she swore she saw his eyes flicker in a way that translated thorough into 'nuts', "but you use the term 'non-intimate' to qualify a lot of things on it and I'm not super sure what that means."

Her brow furrowed. "What do you mean, you don't know what that means?"

"I mean that I don't know what a non-intimate…" he leaned forward to peer at the list, "…facial caress is."

She merely blinked at him. "It means not caressing someone's face intimately."

"Right, but how is 'caressing someone's face intimately' different from just caressing someone's face?"

"It's more intimate."

"Obviously," he countered, "but what makes it intimate? What pushes it into that category?"

"Being all, you know…" she waved a hand around, "gentle and whatnot."

"Gentle?" he echoed. "So if I touch your face, it has to be rough?"

"Wha—no, just not… it's more like…" she struggled to find the words for a second before hitting him with a frank look. "Stefan, you know what intimate is."

"Right, but I don't know what non-intimate caressing is."

"Maybe caressing is the wrong word," she conceded, a little frustrated, and he dropped his gaze back to the contract.

"Well, I also don't know what non-intimate hair play, hand-holding, or lip-biting are, so," he shrugged, "not sure 'caressing' is the problem."

She merely stared at him for a beat, trying to figure out if he was messing with her or not. Who didn't know how to not do things intimately? There wasn't really a specific physical way to describe it, it was more of a feeling, an intention—Damon could do everything on that list and not once would it feel remotely intimate.

Stefan was such a headache.

Plus, she couldn't help but feel like there was a general… off-ness about him right now that she couldn't put her finger on. A brusqueness, almost, or a sense of calculated distance that reminded her of how they used to be. Maybe it was in her head, or maybe it was just a product of the situation, but she felt herself veering onto the defensive because of it.

She shoved the feeling down and gave a brief shake of her head.

"Okay, let's just knock these out one-by-one," she said, straightening up on her knees. "Hair play." She reached a hand up to her own hair and dug her fingers into it, clenching it into a loose fistful. "Non-intimate." Her hand loosened and she let it drift through her hair, strands reverently slipping between her fingers, before tucking a loose wave behind her ear. "Intimate."

He watched her with a blank look. "So I can grab your hair but not run my hands through it."

"No, it's—" she sighed. "It's not really about the physical action, it's about the tone of it."

His lips quirked. "Okay, writer."

Her face flickered a bit, struck by the comment. Her writing hadn't come up since the drigh night in her room, and given his mental state, she'd assumed he'd forgotten about it. She felt strangely warm over the fact that he hadn't. Plus, something about his voice when he'd said it, it'd just… felt a bit more like him.

"Anyway," she said, shaking the feeling and reaching forward to grab his hand—it was warm and large against hers, a little tanner. "Hand-holding." She shifted her wrist so that their palms were pressed together perpendicularly, fingers curling around the sides of each other's hands. "Non-intimate."

He merely stared down in observation.

She shifted her hand back to re-align with his before slowly slipping her fingers through his, intertwining them. She felt the barest trace of callouses on the tips of his fingers and got a little sidetracked by the discovery—did he play guitar? She got a sudden image of camp counselor Stefan playing a Beatles song around a fire for some gaggle of plucky preteens.

It wasn't hard to believe—she imagined he was pretty good with kids. It just felt like an obvious part of him: green eyes, tall, good with kids. She was terrible with them—they were sticky, didn't respect boundaries, and she had no idea how to talk to them. Helping raise Kol was more than enough child exposure for her. But him, she could totally imagine roaming around a forest with little hellions climbing all over him, clinging to his back and tugging on his hand.

He'd be totally cool with it.

Of course he would be.

Unbidden, she had a sudden image of him as a dad. Cooking up some eggs with a monkey of a little girl wrapped around his shoulders. Crouching to fit his tall frame into an elaborate blanket forte. Reading Dr. Suess books and going on unsolicited nerdy anecdotes that put everyone to sleep. Struggling to find ties in the morning because his kids kept using them as karate belts. Slyly edging her toward their bed as she tried to tie the one she'd saved for him around his neck.

"Intimate."

The words snapped her out of her daze, and her throat tightened, face heating up—Jesus Christ. What even—had she really just—she almost lapsed into laugh. Had she really just instinctively imagined herself as his goddamn _wife_? She'd—she'd actually just—she shook her head abruptly. You know what? No. She didn't have the time or the therapist to dive into this right now, so she was striking it from the record.

"What?"

He gave a brief nod at their hands, and she realized they were still intertwined. "I'm assuming this is intimate."

"Right." She slipped her hand from his hastily, shoving it under her leg for good measure—if her mind was free to go on horrifying domestic detours, who knew what her hands were liable to do?

 _Wife,_ though.

 _WITH KIDS._

She needed a drink.

A shower.

Possibly Jesus.

"What was the, uh," she squirmed a bit, sitting more tightly on her hands, "what was the third thing?"

He eyed her fidgeting a bit strangely. "Lip-biting."

 _Ha._

Haha.

Hahahaha.

Yeah, the live demonstrations were over.

"You know what?" she said, sitting up suddenly and pushing herself up to her knees. She twisted around and grabbed her laptop from her bed. "Let's google it."

"Google?" He seemed unconvinced.

"Yep." He merely blinked at her as she whirled back around and resettled on the floor, computer in her lap. "Non… intimate… biting… vs… intimate… biting."

She clicked enter just as he opened his mouth to say something and plopped the laptop down between them, angling the screen so they both could see. After a few seconds, her face froze.

Wow.

That was…

Those were…

Those were really…

Her cheeks flared with heat.

 _Wow_.

She cleared her throat. "There's a, uh… chance I should've put on the safe search setting first."

* * *

Bonnie was still holding his wallet.

In all of the chaos of a goddamn crow charging around her room and shooting straight at her face, she'd somehow managed to _still be holding his wallet_. Despite jumping. Despite shrieking. Despite ducking. Like honestly, what were the odds?

Damon's gaze slowly slid up to hers, silent and inscrutable, and the reality of him being a virtual stranger hit her again, predictably forgotten in her inconvenient rush of hormones. Escaped convict. Fleeing murderer. Con artist. He could be any of those things.

He could be CIA.

He could be Black Ops.

He could be an assassin-for-hire.

Honestly, it'd explain the composure. The air of mystery. The unexpected love of classical literature. Did assassins love classical literature? She had no idea, it just seemed like something they'd be into.

What if he was an international spy?

What if she was his _mark_?

Why the _hell_ would she be his mark, she had the least exciting life on earth. But wasn't that how every spy movie started? Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world until an absurdly attractive stranger in black leather pants shows up guns blazing all 'you're a top secret asset we need to go right now' and _wow_ , she needed to calm the fuck down.

She forced herself back into reality, using the same techniques she'd use when they'd put her on triage during her Emergency Medicine block. Deep breaths. Eyes closed. Mute the noise. Block the unproductive thoughts. Identify the problem.

Her eyes flickered open.

Damon was staring right back at her.

Problem identified.

She bit the inside of her cheek—time to play it cool, Bon _._

"I should probably mention that I, uh," she cleared her throat, "I found your wallet."

Solid start.

10/10.

"I see that."

She lifted her hand to rub her neck. "You left it here last night."

"I figured."

"I didn't like… take it or anything."

His brow quirked. "Didn't think you did."

"It must've fallen out of your pocket when you were sleeping or something weird like that." She balked a bit. "Not that it's weird that you slept with your wallet." Jesus. "I'm sure lots of people do that." What? "Or maybe not lots, but whatever. Screw the masses, you know? You do you."

He merely blinked at her.

She sighed and pressed her lips together, holding the wallet up. "Just take it." Why did this keep happening? She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this big of a mess for this extended of a time—what was being put together even like?

He took the wallet from her with a vague look, gaze thick with something she couldn't place, and after a few seconds of staring at her, he lapsed into a snort, shaking his head. "Jesus."

"What?"

"Must be exhausting."

She merely blinked at him, not following, and he gave her a nod.

"Being you."

Her brow furrowed at the pivot. "What does that mean?"

"Bottling everything in all the time, never saying what you actually want to say," he elaborated, waving a smug hand, and she felt her nerves quell, blood flickering with indignation. It occurred to her that he might be purposefully steering the conversation away from himself and that going after her was the easiest way to do that, but she found herself biting anyway.

"I don't bottle everything in."

He snorted. "Okay."

"I don't."

"Right, and I'm sure you don't deny everything either," he replied, and her stare brightened with annoyance.

"I _don't_."

Like, obviously she bottled up _some_ stuff, but not everything. In fact, aside from certain parts of her past, she actually considered herself a pretty open person—sometimes too open, if some of her supervisors had anything to say about it. There was just something about Damon that kept putting her in randomly uncomfortable situations where it was better to keep her thoughts to herself, that's all.

"Out of curiosity," he ventured, slipping the wallet into the fold of his towel and taking a slow step forward, "what is it that you think's going to happen if you just say what you're actually thinking? Like what cataclysmic event are you so afraid of triggering?"

Just the death of her pride and the earth opening up and swallowing her whole.

"I'm not afraid of triggering anything," she offered instead, stubborn and a little waspish, and he lifted his arms.

"Then just spit it out, kid. Be freeee."

"I am free."

"Let your freak flag fly."

"Okay, _one_ ," she said, pointing a finger at him, and yep, there went her plan to be wary of him, "you don't have to tell a 24-year-old who has an entire fume hood dedicated to displaying her vintage power rangers collection in one of BU's tissue culture rooms to let her freak flag fly. It's flying, buddy. It flies all day. It's flying right now."

His brows ticked up in amusement. "I'm getting that."

"Two," she pressed, undeterred, "I'll have you know I'm usually a _very_ straightforward, easy-going person."

"So it's just around me that you're not."

Shit.

She'd walked right into that one.

Her lips pressed into a tight line.

"Just admit you're acting weird around me."

Her jaw ticced at the certainty in his voice. "Why are you so obsessed with that idea?"

"Why is it so hard to admit?"

"Because it's not true."

It was totally true.

"It's totally true."

Her pulse spiked a bit—clairvoyant spy?

 _Focus, Bonnie._

"Why am I suddenly freaking you out so much?" he pressed, gathering steam, and she tossed her head back with a sharp sigh.

"You're _not_."

"Was it last night, did I not stop it early enough?"

"What? No, it's not—"

"Did I cross a line by letting you—"

" _No,_ " she cut in, really not needing a reminder of the things she'd done to him, and he pushed onward.

"Then what?"

"Nothing," she bit back.

"Let it out."

"There's nothing to—"

"Let's do it on the count of three, ready?"

"Damon—"

"One."

"Would you—"

"Two."

 _Jesus_.

"Thre—"

"I can't stop having sex fantasies about you!" she spat out, bright and exasperated. Just like that. Pointblank. No buffer. Boom.

He reared back at bit, clearly not expecting the answer, and she let out a frustrated huff—honestly, she didn't even friggin' care anymore. He wanted open? Let's get this shit out there.

"I was in the shower this morning, minding my own damn business, and then suddenly you were in there with me and it was all kinds of X-rated, and ever since then that's been happening the whole goddamn day, and I'm just _trying_ ," she growled, lifting a tight hand to wave between them, "to create a little distance so I can get over it, because it's obviously a temporary side effect of not having gotten any in a while, 'cause," she snorted, "I dunno if anyone's ever told you, but med school's hard, but instead, here I am, stuck playing girlfriend with you on this super inconvenient dinner date, which means you're going to be handsy and inescapable all night and I'm just going to be sitting there, fighting the absolutely _ridiculous_ urge to jump you and make things even weirder than they already are." She batted away a wild curl that'd fallen in her eyes. "So maybe you can find it within yourself to cut me some slack, because last night I was on a self-destructive bender and today I'm stuck in a friggin' Fifty Shades of Grey fanfic and needless to say, I'm _just a little bit on edge right now._ "

She took a deep, frustrated breath, jaw set, hands curled into fists at her sides. He merely blinked at her, thrown.

"And I also went through your wallet," she added after a beat, blunt as a hammer—might as well get it all out there while she was hot. "So I'm kind of convinced you might be dangerous, but my fear of your potential plan to murder me keeps getting edged out by my fantasizing. Like right now," she gestured at him unabashedly, "I'm wondering if Fell is your violent criminal record name and thinking about googling it, but I'm also hoping your towel falls off. It's all really healthy."

She whirled around and headed over to her dresser, body buzzing with the kind of adrenaline that came from throwing caution to the wind and not giving a damn anymore. She knew she was on a time limit, that any second now her burst of boldness would fade and she'd realize she'd said all of this to him while they were literally stuck under the same roof, but right now, it just felt too good to get it all out there.

Give in to the crazy.

Shut him the hell up.

She grabbed the Neosporin, an ointment, and a few Band-Aids she kept in the med kit in her top drawer and walked back over to him, stubbornly disregarding the tension in the room. He had yet to say a word.

"Spray this on all of your cuts." She held up the Neosporin before setting it on the windowsill, avoiding his eye. She felt his stare slowly sliding down her face, ignoring the can entirely. "After that, dab this on these three." She tapped the tube of ointment above the three deeper cuts before setting it next to the Neosporin. "Let it sit for a minute and then cover those plus this one." She pointed at a mid-sized cut and then sternly held out the Band-Aids for him to take, stare finally lifting to his. "And make sure you don—"

He pushed her hand out of the way and moved forward.

She was kissing him before she could even think.

The flare of electricity was immediate, addictive, charging her blood as completely and potently as it had the night before. No time lost. Zero to a hundred in the second it took his hands to catch her face and angle it up. She dropped the Band Aids and wrapped her arms around his neck, surging to her tiptoes to pull him in, and _God_ , she never knew the smell of Caroline's lavender shampoo could be such a turn-on.

His lips were softer than she'd remembered, not quite as rough as they'd been in her crazy cat lady fantasies, and the realness of it lit her up like a match—this wasn't some X-rated daydream. This was him. The heat of his real mouth and the hum of his real skin and the friction of his real frame against hers. She felt them backtracking toward her bed, hands roving, neither sure who was moving the other in a Ouija board-like effect, and it wasn't until the back of his legs hit the edge that she snapped to her senses.

"No," she said suddenly, pulling back in a jerky move. She couldn't do this, Jesus Christ, she was _not_ thinking straight. "No, no, this is," she shook her head, arms tight around his neck, and his stare was on her mouth, dark and distracted, "such a bad—"

Fuck it.

She was kissing him again in a hot, hungry blur, abandoning her sentence, and _God_ , it was like indulging a craving. Her whole body was buzzing, blood thick with heat and a clamoring need for more, and just as she felt him drop his grip to her waist to hoist her up, she hastily pulled back again.

"No," she repeated, shaking her head sharply and pressing her hands to his chest, fully aware of how insane she must've looked—she was the one who'd pulled him in. "This—" she swallowed thickly, closing her eyes—how the everloving hell was this happening _sober_? She'd just found out he might be a hit man, for Christ's fucking sake. "This is a bad idea."

"Generally my favorite kind." His heartbeat was uneven beneath her palm, voice a flutter against her lips, and she groaned at the token Bad Boy response.

"Where do you get these horrible lines?"

"That was a great line."

"So bad," she murmured miserably.

"So judgy," he countered in a rumble, fingers sliding up beneath her sweater, and she couldn't help the flare of adrenaline at how shameless it was, how magnetized his hands were to her skin—it was like her confession had switched on some kind of green light in him and now he was all in.

He was all in and he wasn't wasting a single second being coy about it.

She breathed in slowly, knocking her forehead against his and indulging in the heat of his breath against her lips. Her skin was thrumming—every nerve ending was begging her to wrap herself around him, luxuriate in him, let out all the pent-up stress she'd been accumulating over the past 48 hours. Hell, over the past few weeks, really—maybe even the past month, given her brutal surgery rotation and tough as nails attending.

She could get as rough as she wanted.

As careless as she wanted.

She could dig her nails into him, sink her teeth into him, work every last thread of tension out.

She knew unsettlingly, intimately well that he could take it. That he was more than willing to take it.

But she'd already exhausted her capacity for shitty decision-making last night, and she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she'd regret this once her hormones calmed down.

She just didn't do this.

She didn't do casual sex—not anymore, not after all the times she'd used it as a shitty coping mechanism in the past. She did boyfriends. Stability. Longevity. Safety. Hookups always left her feeling empty, and no matter how fun or harmless they felt in the moment, she couldn't ever fully dissociate them from memories of smoky bathrooms and gin-soured breath and far older hands gripping her skinny teen hips.

And also, _it was Damon._

"Tell me more about these fantasies," he murmured as if on cue, voice a rumble against her lips, and her eyes flickered open to meet his. They were half-lidded slits of zaffre in the shadows pooling between their faces.

Her voice came out thicker than she meant it to. "My current one is you getting nymphomania counseling."

"Mm, therapy roleplay," he mumbled, brushing his nose against hers and sending a frission of heat down her spine, "I'm into it."

His fingers slid down the length of her hips, easing them closer—he was already hardening, his towel doing mercilessly little to conceal the fact. God, she hated that towel. "Damon."

"Bonnie."

She felt her eyes falling shut again, her name a lure on his tongue. "This isn't happening."

He brushed his lips against hers. "Maybe you should let your hands know that."

Her eyes flickered open, and a brief glance made her realize she was digging her fingers into his chest, pulling him closer.

Fuck.

She inhaled sharply and pushed him back, forcing herself to take a few steps away. The smack of cool air was immediate and welcome, and she took in a deep, centering breath of it, whirling away from him and pushing her hair out of her face. She could sense him behind her, the heat of him likely imagined since he was a few feet away, but it flooded her skin with bumps nonetheless. She imagined his tall, hard frame slowly easing up behind her, his hands slipping around her waist, lips ghosting against her ear as they mumbled out a smokey 'you sure, kid?'

She wasn't sure.

She shook her head abruptly—fuck, yes, she was. She was absolutely sure. The answer was no.

She cleared her throat. "So just, um, make sure to give the Neosporin a chance to dry before you put the other stuff on," she continued as if nothing had happened, stubbornly facing away from him, "since they target different bacterial strains and you need to kill off both."

He lapsed into a disbelieving laugh behind her.

"And make sure to put the Band Aids on the ones I showed you," she pressed on, ignoring his amusement and straightening her sweater from where he'd bunched it up, "because they're extra prone to infection."

"I actually wasn't paying attention before, could you show me whi—"

"Figure it out."

She could practically hear his lips quirking in the silent beat that followed. "Fine."

"And for Christ's sake, put on some clothes," she added irritably—really, it all came down to that. This probably could've all been avoided if he could just figure out how friggin' shirts worked.

"I'm actually not done with my shower."

"Then go finish it."

He heaved a gusty sigh, and she heard the rustle of him walking toward her. "Doctor's orders," he sing-songed as he passed her, taking care to linger a bit by her ear, and she felt her jaw clench a bit, stare trained stubbornly forward.

He took a few more steps before catching the doorframe with his hands and using it to lean back into the room. "For the record, if I'd known you found me so irresistible, I would've never waltzed in here all wet and naked."

Her stoic expression cracked at the narcissism. "Oh, yes you would've. In fact you probably would've forgone the towel entirely. Luckily," she shot him a frosty smile, "you're not irresistible."

"Like catnip to a starving stray."

"I literally just resisted you."

"It's not going to last."

"It's absolutely going to last."

"Guess we'll find out in a few hours when you can't avoid me anymore." He waggled his eyebrows at her, though his expression promptly grew thoughtful. "You know, this dinner just got so much more fun—I think I might actually be looking forward to it."

Her eyes thinned as she held his gaze, jaw tight and shoulders a little stiff, and after a few seconds, he winked.

"See you in a bit, lover."

"I hope a whole bird zoo attacks you."

"Oh, and I'll make sure to button my shirt all the way up tonight," he called over his shoulder as he disappeared down the hallway, voice a little muffled. "Don't want to give you a stroke."

She pressed her lips together in a tight line, a potent cocktail of annoyance, embarrassment, and self-pity suffusing her in roughly equal measure. How did she even get here? If five days ago someone had told her she'd be going over to Kai's for dinner and her biggest concern would be keeping herself from dragging Caroline's narcissistic shithead of a boy toy into the nearest corner and climbing him, she would've diagnosed them.

What was her life.

Jesus Christ.

She needed a pop tart.

* * *

"That is _not_ romantic."

"It's totally romantic!"

"Are you kidding me?" Stefan said, popping a handful of Smart Pop into his mouth as he watched an intense onscreen kiss play out on Caroline's laptop. "He's vacuuming her face."

"Wha—no, forget that, look at the way he's holding her," Caroline said, sucking on the remaining stub of her candy cane, and Stefan snorted.

"I can't, I'm too distracted by the very real concern that he's going to suck up one of her vital organs."

She lapsed into a laugh despite herself. "You're completely missing the point."

"If someone was trying to suck up my pancreas I'd very much think that's the point."

She pressed her lips together, eyes glittering with humor—to be fair, she had no idea what movie this scene was from but there was a very real chance it was upscale Italian porn. They both winced when the woman started moaning theatrically. "Okay, yeah, maybe this isn't the best example."

He smirked as she leaned forward to click on a different video—what had to be at least their hundredth of the day at this point. The pale blue afternoon had deepened into sapphirine dusk outside, coating her room in shadow, and their sprawled figures were little more than hazy silhouettes against the lone light of the laptop screen. Scattered chip bags and candy bar wrappers reflected the glow around them, busted out of Caroline's hidden snack drawer about thirty videos in, and in a twist of events she would've never predicted when they'd pressed the first play button, watching a ton of videos of random couples kissing had made things oddly…

Comfortable.

Between them.

Not completely, obviously—there were a few kitchen makeout scenes that hit a little too close to home to ignore—but for the most part, it'd mostly been laughter. Banter. Squabbles over what was intimate and what wasn't. In large part because there was some _seriously_ weird shit on Youtube, but also because somehow, despite being the entire reason for doing it, they'd almost forgotten about the contract.

"Okay, check out this guy," she said, biting off the end of her candy cane. "Total sap hands—don't do any of that."

"Is that a houndstooth scarf?"

She rolled her eyes. "Do you make it a point to focus on the wrong thing?"

"I've just always wanted to know what houndstooth looks like."

"Why?"

"It's just one of those terms I've always heard but have never actually known what it looks like."

She waved a baffled hand at the laptop screen. "Google it."

"Doesn't count."

"Why?"

"I need to see it in real life."

"How does that make any sense?"

"Can't explain it."

She snorted at his stubborn shrug. "Well, first of all, that scarf is argyle, so no dice, and second of all," she leaned forward and typed 'houndstooth' into the search bar, drawing a flare of protest from Stefan, " _this_ is houndstooth."

She hit enter and he averted his eyes, holding up a hand to block the view of the screen. "No."

"Stefan."

"No."

Laughter brightened her voice. "Are you serious?"

"There's too much anticipation now, I can't ruin the fantasy."

"Just look at it."

The corners of his mouth pulled up into a playful grin. "No."

She merely stared at him for a second before sighing exasperatedly. "Fine." She navigated to the old tab, resumed the video, waited for him to drop his hand, and then switched back to the houndstooth image search just as he glanced over.

" _Really_?"

"Houndstooth," she said smugly, and he pretended to be indignant for a second before leaning forward and frowning at the screen.

"Is that it?"

"Yep."

"That's so boring, it's just like checkered."

"What did you expect?"

"I don't know, something more Sherlock Holmesy. Didn't he wear houndstooth?"

"How would I know?"

He slid the laptop toward him and typed something into the search bar. "Ha—knew it." He whirled it back around and an image of a houndstooth wool blend hat was splashed over the screen. "Sherlock's hat."

"Congrats."

"Thanks."

They merely held each other's gazes for a beat, warm in the easy air and dim laptop light, and after a few seconds, his lips flickered, parting as if to say something. He hesitated briefly, and then, "You know, earlier today, I—"

The alert on her laptop went off, signaling that the battery was at ten percent, and she reached over and slid it shut, accidentally drowning them in near darkness.

He reared back. "Jesus, when did it get so late?"

"It's probably not," she said, grudgingly pushing herself onto her feet and heading over to her nightstand. "Dark by 4:30, yay Boston winters." She switched on the light and winced immediately, eyes struggling to adjust to the flare, and after a few seconds, she grabbed up the wristwatch strewn across the table. "It's quarter till six."

"What time was their dinner date?"

"Seven?" she guessed through a thick yawn, slowly pulling her arms over her head—all that time on the floor had made her muscles stiff. She arched her back a bit, hair slipping off her shoulders as she reached way up to the ceiling, and after a few blissful, lingering seconds, she reluctantly broke the stretch, arms falling back to her sides. "Maybe seven thirty."

She glanced over at him and stilled a bit when she realized his gaze was elsewhere.

Specifically, flickering down the length of her.

A little darker.

A little thicker.

It quickly flicked back up to meet hers and took a second to clear. Revert back to the mild grey-green it usually was.

It was a not unwelcome reminder of what they were supposed to be doing here. The contract. The edits. Ironing out the details of their exclusively sexual relationship. Not laughing over snacks and shitty love scenes from shows. She straightened up a bit, pushing a slightly tense hand through her hair. "So." She cleared her throat. "Do you think you've finally got a handle on the whole non-intimate thing, or…"

His mouth ticked up at the corner. "Well, seeing as we disagreed on about 75% of those videos—"

"Forget the," she hesitated, shaking her hand a little exasperatedly, "forget the videos, they really weren't that helpful—I mean in general."

He seemed to catch on to her downtick in playfulness as he straightened a bit, expression drawing into a considering look. "I… sure. I guess."

Her brows lifted at the less than inspiring response. "You guess?"

He gave a vague nod, and she continued staring at him until he sighed. "Can I be honest?"

"Please."

"I'm still kind of convinced the only thing I'm allowed to do is throw you around."

She couldn't help the flicker of humor at his sincerely harassed expression. "What?"

"Or like pull your hair."

Her gaze took on a baffled glint. "I don't even like hair-pulling."

"Well, okay, then not even that," he said, waving a hand, and she blinked at him.

"Stefan, everything you've done so far has been fine. I mean," her eyes narrowed into a considering look, "you could maybe tone down some of the Disney prince stares—"

"Why does everyone always associate me with Disney?"

"—and ax some of your gooier lines, but other than that, you're totally within the rules." She shrugged as he settled back against the wall, processing. "That contract is more for preventing things from happening down the road."

He eyed her vaguely for a beat. "So last night. The kitchen, that was…"

She felt a flicker of warmth at the memory of it. "I think some of the of lead-up was a little too much, but overall, fine."

"What part of the lead-up was too much?"

She shifted slightly on her feet—she knew he was going to ask that. "Just, you know, the whole," she waved a hand before dropping it to rub her neck, "flirty, I'd do this and that if you asked… thing."

His brows ticked up a bit. "That wasn't all me."

"I didn't say it was."

A beat of silence fell over them, slowly starting to spark with the beginnings of their old tension. It'd been notably absent for over an hour now, lost in the distraction of banter and youtube, lifting its head every now and again to consider rousing before deciding it wasn't worth it and settling back down, but now?

She could tell it was back.

She just felt it.

It textured the air around them differently, introduced a quiet, lingering volatility.

Which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, it just… definitely chased away the sense of ease.

"Look, I'm pretty sure we've got a lot of contract to cover, so we should probably move on from this."

"Right."

"If you're confused in the future, just try not to do anything… relationship-y, you know? When in doubt, just…" she waved a hand, "I don't know, think of past girlfriends—think of how you'd kiss Elena," she suggested, not really thinking.

The reaction was subtle, but she caught it anyway—the shift in his stare, the stiffening in the sprawl of his limbs.

Shit.

She hadn't thought that through.

"I'd, uh," he began after a few seconds, dropping his stare as his lips flickered into a slightly bitter attempt at a smile, "I'd rather not."

"Right." She nodded briefly. "Obviously. That was…" she dropped her gaze to her hands, "insensitive."

"It's fine," he said, voice a little distant. She felt a flicker of guilt wash over her. She knew firsthand how much of a dagger it was when people dropped Matt references when she wasn't expecting it—it was like being grabbed by the throat. But at the same time, he was just so goddamn clueless, she really didn't know how else to make her point.

Or rather, she did, but…

She slowly pressed her lips together, reconsidering the demonstration technique. The air between them _was_ a lot easier now. Plus, it really hadn't been _that_ bad earlier. It wasn't like a few questionable mental detours actually meant anything, and it wasn't like he could read her mind, so…

Her kindling gaze lifted back up to him. Was it the best solution ever? No. But she'd rather risk a little confusion to nip this in the bud now than have him get all romantic later in the heat of the moment. That was when it actually counted. This was controlled.

She raked a quick glance over his face—his eyes were still faraway and averted, brows a little drawn, lost in what she was sure was Elena-land. She bit her lip. Probably wouldn't hurt to distract him a bit, either.

"Okay, so," she began, ignoring the tinny voice in her head telling her this was a horrible idea as she carefully began moving the laundry piles between them, "I have no intention of making a habit out of this."

His vague stare lifted back up to her, slowly focusing back into reality. "Making a habit out of what?"

"Demonstrating obvious things to you," she replied, a little annoyed, and his brow furrowed as she got onto her knees and edged over to him.

"What does that…"

His voice trailed off as she dropped a knee on either side of his hips, settling into his lap in a snug straddle that was beginning to feel a little too familiar. His stare darkened a bit, glinting with a mix of confusion and budding intrigue. "You remember how I kissed you earlier today, right?"

"Hard to forget," he replied, distracted, puzzled, a little turned on, and she lifted her hands up to his shoulders. They were warm and lean, unassumingly defined beneath the cotton of his t-shirt, and she thought she could feel the faint echo of a quickening heartbeat.

"This is going to be different," she explained, dropping a brief glance to his lips. They were slightly parted, the corners tipped a bit, and a small, irrational bundle of nerves washed through her. "And everything that feels different about it is what not to do, so…" she gave him a brief nod, "I'm going to need you to focus."

His lips flickered slightly, stare fixed on hers. "I'll try."

"What _not_ to do."

"Got it."

"As in don't do any of this."

"I speak English."

She offered him a tight smile. "Good."

A few seconds passed. Nothing happened. She felt herself growing tense, blood buzzing—she couldn't quite bring herself to move. They just sat there, gazes locked, bodies curled around each other, faces less than a foot apart. Why had she thought this was a good idea again?

"Gotta say," he said after a beat, voice a little wry, "differences are pretty obvious so far."

She shook her head slightly to clear it. "Sorry, I was just… strategizing."

His brows lifted. "Strategizing?"

"Yeah."

"Is it that involved?"

"It's—" her jaw tightened as his stare dropped to her mouth, lips pressing together—you know what? Enough. "No, it's not." And before she could slip back into whatever weird paralysis was affecting her, she leaned forward and caught his lips in a swift, determined kiss.

It was mechanical at first. Straightforward. Matter-of-fact. In the rush of fending off her nerves, she'd forgotten what the goal of it all was, but after a few seconds, it came back to her.

Affectionate. Intimate. What not to do.

Her mouth softened. She eased the momentum back a bit, shifting the kiss into something lighter, less direct. Her hands, thoughtlessly pressed against his shoulders, slowly slid up his neck to cup his face, palms curling around the sharp line of his jaw. His breath was a quiet flutter against her lips.

It took him a bit to respond, seemingly caught up in observation, but after a stretch of stillness, she felt the brush of his hand sliding up her spine. He eased his fingers into her hair, his other hand slipping around her waist, pulling her in, but the pace of the kiss stayed quietly, steadily intimate, even as her body pressed up against his.

She could feel his heartbeat. Or maybe it was hers. Or maybe it was both, synced up at a pace far too flutteringly fast than anything they were doing called for. His body was addictively, headily warm, even in the icy draft seeping through her window, and she felt the budding urge to curl into him. Wrap herself in him like a jacket. Indulge in the hum of his skin.

A wash of nerves coursed through her.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd kissed anyone like this. Had let anyone kiss her like this. Soft, unhurried, nipping, without sex as the deafening target. It made her feel vulnerable and safe in disconcertingly equal measure, and she had to keep reminding herself that that was the point was to keep her anxiety at bay. His hand was on her face, knuckles brushing down the hollow of her cheek before tipping her chin up to deepen the kiss, and she parted her lips against the slip of his tongue.

It was unsettling, letting herself do all the things she normally didn't do. Fanning feather-light fingers over the stubble of his jaw. Sprawling across his lap without trying to work him into a frenzy. Indulging in him. Exploring him. Wondering about him outside the scope of this apartment. Was he was always this inviting, this warm? What was he like after long nights in the library, stiff with stress before a big case—was he still this gentle, this unhurried? Were his lips still this soft after walking home through a flurry of snow?

She felt heady. She was kissing him deeply, slowly, the kind of languishing kiss that radiated through veins and gathered in toes. She wondered what he was like with Elena, if he'd always kissed her like this. Wondered if he'd scoop her up and ease her down onto his sheets like a lit wick that'd blow out if he moved too fast. Wondered if he'd sigh her name against her lips, his lungs filling with it, breathing it, aerating the trill of syllables.

Wondered if 'Caroline' would've sounded better.

The thought sent a jolt of alarm down her spine— _what?_

Okay.

Time to stop this.

Lesson had definitely been learned.

Point made.

Demonstration over.

 _Now, Caroline._

She dropped a hand to his chest and pushed a bit, and after a slow, lingering moment, his mouth eased back. Not enough, though. Not enough to keep the warmth of his breath off her lips. Not enough to keep their noses from brushing against each other. Not enough to make him drop his fingers from her face. It took a second for her to settle herself and brace for reality, and when her eyes fluttered open, he was staring at her.

A lidded, mystified grey-green stare that spiked her already elevated pulse. She cleared her throat, forcing down her anxiety and giving her chin a perfunctory tilt upward. "So." She swallowed stiffly. "Different?"

He blinked, shadowed gaze flitting down her face. "Little bit." His voice was thick, quiet.

"Good." She forced the corners of her lips up. "That's, uh…" he was staring at her mouth and she dropped her gaze, giving a brief nod, "that's what not to do."

"Mm," he hummed, and she felt the vibration of his chest against her hand.

"It just… blurs lines."

"Right."

"Makes things confusing."

"Sure."

"Makes people think they feel things they—"

"You have completely symmetrical freckles."

Her eyes flickered back up to his, caught off-guard—his expression was hazy, distracted, stare slipping over her face. "What?"

"They're mirror images," he murmured, sliding the pad of his thumb over the arc of flecks on her left cheek and causing a wash of butterflies to flutter through her. "Every freckle you have on this side, you have one in exactly the same place on the other side."

She stared at him for a humming beat before averting her eyes. "I, um… never really—"

"Except this one."

His thumb swiped down to the mark just above the left corner of her mouth. The feather-light friction left a flare of warmth across her cheek, and her pulse skittered at his proximity to her lips, at how easily he could brush a fingertip over them.

"This one's a rebel freckle." His lips flickered a bit, and after a quiet beat, his gaze finally lifted back up to hers. She met it slowly—it was a pale, ruminative green. "Suits you."

Her skin was buzzing with conflict. Part of her was convinced he knew exactly what he was doing, knew exactly what the difference between intimate and casual was, knew exactly how unsettled he was making her, that this was all some fun little game to him and she was playing right into it. Not-That-Nice Stefan. Lawyer dangerous. Pushing boundaries and slipping past walls just to see how far her weak resolve would let him get.

But there was just something about him, this gooey, ridiculous earnestness that she didn't think anyone was capable of faking. It radiated from him, honeyed his eyes, warmed his fingertips, clung to him like an aura that even his cynical comments and judgmental moments couldn't quite crack. He bled sincerity. It'd always annoyed her before, but right now…

Right now it was the reason she found herself saying: "Your eyes are slightly different colors."

His stare flickered with curiosity. "Really?"

"Mmm-hmm," she hummed. She knew she shouldn't be encouraging it, but the air around them was so quiet, so lulling, she was magnetized to it. Besides, it was true—his right iris was the slightest bit paler, the green rim less pigmented than the left one. "This one's a little greyer."

Her index finger traced a line from his right eyebrow to the jut of his cheekbone. "Could just be the lighting," he murmured a little thickly, and she felt her lips flicker.

"Or maybe Disney Prince Stefan actually just has an imperfection."

He let out a light scoff. "Never."

Her mouth curled. "No?"

"Not possible."

Her eyes fell into a glinting squint. "You know, I actually feel like your mouth might be a little crooked."

His mouth edged open in mock-appall. "Slander."

"And these ears?" She winced as she slipped her hand up to finger the lobe of one and he pretended to duck away.

"I'm not putting up with this."

He made to push her off him and she lapsed into a laugh, recoiling from the playful grip on her arms. The layer of faux-outrage melted from his face, lips flickering at the corners as he settled back underneath her, and God, his smile was so dumbly sincere, she wanted to punch him.

"Might be a _small_ chance I'm not perfect," he conceded after a few seconds, and a low chuckle textured his voice. "A fact you've always been exceptionally aware of."

Something about the comment gave her pause. It was true, she had always been exceptionally aware of his flaws. Cuttingly. Unsympathetically. To the point of exaggerated presumption, really—she'd even made some of them up. And yet, sitting there in his lap, one hand resting against his neck, the other still poised against the steady thrum of his heartbeat, stares fixed and glittering as they took each other in…

She was struggling to remember any of them.

A knock sounded on the door.

"Care?"

The spell shattered, and she immediately scrambled off him at the sound of Bonnie's voice, knocking a few stacks of laundry over in the process. "Just a sec!"

"What do you want me to do?" he murmured, uncertain, and she pushed a stressed hand through her hair—how the hell did she let this keep happening?

"Uh, desk—go sit at my desk, we'll say you're just helping me with work." His jaw ticked a bit, visibly unhappy with the lie, and she scoffed. "Stefan, we'll tell her, okay? Let's just work this contract out first—no more distractions."

He sighed, pushing himself up to his feet and heading over to the desk, and Caroline hopped onto her bed and crossed her legs, grabbing one of her work binders off her nightstand and leaning back against the headboard. She waited for Stefan to sit down before clearing her throat. "Come in!"

Bonnie pushed the door open with a deep sigh, general countenance miserable, and Caroline frowned, momentarily forgetting about Stefan. "I need clothes," she said, immediately clearing any real concern and spilling into the room without even noticing her other best friend. She collapsed face-first against the bed.

Caroline's brows slid upward, stare flickering up to Stefan's. "Uh…"

"Hey, Bon."

The brown headful of curls lifted in confusion at the sound of Stefan's voice. "Stefan?" Her eyes zipped up to Caroline's, bright with questions, and Caroline offered a tense little shrug.

"He's going over some work stuff with me."

Bonnie pushed herself up to her elbows and shot Stefan a probing look over her shoulder. Caroline's heart sped up a little bit—she was going to figure it out. How could she not—Stefan was alone with her in her room, door closed, lips a little redder than usual, expression annoyingly guilty. Drunk Bonnie might've been oblivious to all that, but sober Bonnie was bound to—

"Whatever, I guess you can help, too," she sighed, twisting around and collapsing against the covers, resigned arm draping over her forehead. "I don't know what to wear to this dumb dinner."

Caroline merely blinked, stare flicking up to Stefan's. He looked uncomfortable as hell, wiry frame stiff in her chair, and she widened her eyes a bit at him. 'Get it together,' she mouthed.

'We need to tell her,' he mouthed back.

Her brows flew up. ' _Now_?' He shrugged in an is-there-ever-really-going-to-be-a-good-time way and she shook her head, baffled. 'She's about to go on a—' she dropped her hand and forced her mouth into a bright smile as Bonnie flung her arm off her face, sighing at the ceiling.

"Do you think anyone would buy that I contracted some kind of flesh-eating bacteria over the past hour?"

Stefan's brow furrowed. "I told you to let me tell him you were sick."

Her nose scrunched up. "I hate that you're always right."

"You'd think you'd be used to it by now."

"Maybe it's because when you're wrong, you're like…" she waved a hand, eyes widening, " _super_ wrong."

"Ha."

"Like so wrong it's impossible to remember that you've ever been right in your entire life."

"Okay."

"Like remember that camping trip where you were _so_ convinced there was a bear," she began, and he sighed, stare flickering up to the ceiling, "and you were all ' _everyone stay calm_ , bear trivia this, factoid that, I'm a wilderness expert' and then it was just a barbecue."

Caroline burst into a snort despite herself and his gaze dropped down to hers. "A _barbecue_?"

"A barbecue," Bonnie confirmed, angling her head back to meet her stare.

"Wow."

"Like you have any room to talk," Stefan said. "Seen any more serial killer cats since yesterday?"

Caroline pressed her lips together as Bonnie shot her an upside down frown. "What?"

" _Nothing_ ," Caroline said, shaking her head, and Stefan's lips twitched.

"Nothing at all."

Bonnie's brows flew up, gaze flickering between the two of them for a second before she pushed herself up into a sitting position. "Did you two just have an inside joke?"

Stefan dropped his stare, some of his stiffness from earlier coming back under the sudden scrutiny, and Caroline sat up a bit straighter to jump in. "It was from when we went looking for you in the basement—I thought there was a serial killer, turned out to be a cat, no big deal."

Bonnie hummed vaguely, stare still fixed on Stefan, and this time Caroline could tell she was picking up on something. She had her doctor face on—the curious, drawn, subtle one that assessed a situation and sifted through solutions—and Stefan was very obviously avoiding her eye.

"So, what are you wearing tonight?" Caroline ventured, knowing the topic would crack through Bonnie's searchlight-like focus, and predictably, Bonnie met her stare with a resigned one of her own.

"No idea, but I'm going for a hybrid between friendly-enough-you-wouldn't-want-to-kill-me and lethal-enough-to-kill-you-first-if-you-try."

"Just ran an ad campaign for that last week."

"My hero."

"Stefan," Caroline said, shooting him a subtly pointed look, "I'm going to help Bonnie pick something out but I'll finish going through your edits later—thanks for the help."

He gave a brief nod as he pushed himself to his feet, taking care to leave the contract facedown on her desk. "Sure."

"In case I never see you again," Bonnie deadpanned as he made his way to the door, holding a hand to heart, "know that I'm still only friends with you for your gorgonzola cream."

"Let me know when you're leaving," he said, lifting a hand to point at her in the doorway. "Seriously."

"Why, are you going to wire me up?" she asked, face growing conspiratorial. "Keep tabs, listen in." She frowned after a second. "Actually, could you, 'cause I'm pretty sure he's soundproofed his apartment."

"Find me," he insisted over his shoulder as he left, and Caroline watched him disappear into the living room till the swinging door obscured him from view.

She turned back to Bonnie with a bright look. "So."

Bonnie sighed. "So."

She took in her resigned, miserable expression and lapsed into a snort. "You're going to be fine, Bon—Damon's tougher than he looks. I saw him get into a fight once when we were out and the bouncers had to rip him off the other guy."

Bonnie frowned, gaze sobering a bit at the words. "Really? What kind of fight?"

Caroline shrugged, the details a little hazy in her head—she'd been pretty drunk, too. "Just a typical bar fight, I think—ape 1 insults ape 2, ape 2 throws a zinger back at ape 1, fists fly, masculinities are established, blah blah." Bonnie merely stared at her, eyes thick with curiosity. "Honestly, all I remember for sure is that Damon knew what he was doing."

"Would you say like… knows how to land sloppy punches knew-what-he-was-doing, or professionally trained somewhere knew-what-he-was-doing?"

Caroline arched a brow.

"I'm just, you know," Bonnie reached up to rub the back of her neck, "wondering what level of protection I'm going in with tonight."

"I mean, I'm not super sure what trained fighting looks like—he wasn't like a ninja or anything—but he can definitely handle himself." Caroline's gaze took on a glitter as she attempted to inject a little humor. "It was pretty hot, honestly—I was all over him afterwards."

Bonnie's stare flickered up to hers, unexpectedly sharp. It cleared after a few seconds. "Right."

Caroline frowned at the reaction. What was _that_?

Bonnie averted her gaze and pushed herself off the bed, walking over to her closet, and Caroline watched her with a keen look—hooooold on a second. Time-out. Pause.

Earlier this morning, she'd gotten definite sexy timez vibes from the two of them, as in she was pretty sure some drunken nonsense had gone down and Bonnie was doing her Bonnie thing and being an awkward turtle about it. Now, though… now she was getting different vibes. Trickier vibes. Deeper and more fleshed out.

Had that been a flicker of jealousy?

She chewed her lip, debating saying something. Under normal circumstances, she would've pounced and badgered the truth out of her till she caved, but given the far bigger secret Caroline was lording over her head, she wasn't sure she could ever come back from that degree of hypocrisy.

Eh—only one way to find out.

"Hey, are you into Da—"

A shriek cut her off as a rabid crow crashed into her room.

* * *

Damon was a guy who knew when he looked good.

He had to—his looks were a skill, a currency he used to open doors and slip out of sticky situations and get wherever it was he needed to go. Somewhere along his minefield of a life, he'd realized he was a good-looking kid, and being the scrappy, desperate little thing that he was, he'd weaponized it.

Of course, that also meant he knew when he didn't look good, and earlier that morning, he'd be the first person to tell you he hadn't. He'd looked worn out. Pale. His skin was thin with exhaustion and residual alcohol, his eyes overbright with caffeine, jaw a shadowed mess of patchiness and stubble.

But as he stood in the bathroom mirror now, buttoning up the freshly laundered shirt he'd been wearing the night he got here, face shaven and hair a thick, inky swathe over his head, he knew for a fact that he looked good. Really good. Largely because of a shower, a comb, a razor, some gel, and the transformative magic of bespoke Hugo Boss, but also because of a certain green-eyed girl of many surprises.

Happy wasn't the word, exactly. Intrigued wasn't either. Satisfied, smug, curious—they all applied in trivial degrees but fell short.

There was something else slanting his mouth, sharpening the twinkle of his gaze—something more like enjoyment. He was genuinely enjoying himself. He was genuinely enjoying wearing something other than girl's sweatpants. And he was genuinely enjoying the fact that somewhere in this apartment, exasperated and annoyed, all five-foot-nothing of Bonnie Bennett was trying to distract herself from having big, lurid fantasies about him.

To say he wasn't expecting her little confession was an understatement. Then again, it was hardly the first thing he'd been wrong about with her, so he couldn't really call it too big of a surprise. He was realizing more and more that he couldn't quite predict what he was going to get from her. With most people, he could. He could read the mannerisms and observe the patterns and construct a file in his head of more or less who he was dealing with. With Bonnie, though, he just kept rewriting the file. Removing assumptions, adding contradicting traits, struggling to spit out an overall result that made any sense.

He normally didn't like being wrong, but he was really starting to like being wrong about her.

Particularly when it made her handsy.

He glanced at his watch as he finished cuffing up his sleeves, attempting to dress the shirt down a bit—6:54. They needed to head out. His grabbed his phone and shoved it into his pocket, casting his gaze around for his wallet, and upon swiping it up, he hesitated for a second, staring at it. He knew he should've put the Fell ID away before he'd gone out that night.

He'd just been in such a rush and figured he'd be back in the morni—

His phone began vibrating in his pocket, signaling that it was 6:55, and he pocketed the wallet and slipped out of the bathroom, silencing the alarm as he headed down the hallway to Bonnie's room. He hadn't seen her since she'd kissed him. His lips took on a sly curl at the memory.

"Love of my liiiife," he called out like the shithead he was, easing to a halt in front of her door and giving it a brief knock. "It's 5 till. Gotta jet."

He heard some fumbling. A muted crash. The click of heels on the ground.

His brow furrowed.

"Witchy."

He knocked again, this time a little harder.

"Just a—" a muffled curse, "just a second."

He sighed, leaning against the doorframe and crossing his arms. She'd better literally mean a second 'cause being late to this lunacy was decidedly not the foot he wanted to start out on. He could still see the crazed look in Kilimanjaro's eyes when he'd told them to be on time no matter what. Besides, he just hated lateness in general. It made him anxious, irritable—in a life of constant upheaval, punctuality was one of the only stabilities he could afford. When he committed to being somewhere at a certain time, he'd be there.

Thirty seconds turned into forty. Forty into a minute. A minute into two. He checked his watch with a low exhale—6:57.

"Bonnie," he drawled, rapping on the door. "We've got three minutes. Up and 'em, kid, let's g—"

The door flying open cut him off, and he caught the briefest glance of bright, kohl-rimmed cat eyes before she whirled around and stumbled back into her room, heeled feet struggling to avoid the hurricane of clothes on the floor. His brows ticked up at the tight little sweater dress number she was wrapped in, mouth instinctively lifting at the corners.

"I'm overdressed, I'm aware, Caroline went overboard," she growled, waving a blind hand as she teetered over to her bed-turned-closet. "I just need two seconds to change into real clothes."

His enjoyment flickered, brow diving into a furrow. "It's like three till seven—you don't have time to change."

"Yes, I do—he lives right next door," she bit back, kicking off the sky-high heels and grabbing up a pair of jeans, and he took a baffled step into the room.

"Uh, did you not see his face when he said lateness drove him crazy? 'Cause it looked like he was telekinetically breaking puppy spines."

She yanked a sweater out of a pile of shirts on her floor. "It'll be fine."

"Bonnie, we're leaving now," he said, pointblank, and she heaved a hasty sigh.

"Two minutes."

"He said—no, _hissed_ to be there at seven on the dot—and that's in approximately," he shot a harassed glance at his watch, " _one_ minute."

"Turn around so I can change."

"We've got to go."

" _Turn around so I can change_."

For Christ's sake—he strode into the room and she frowned at him as she took off one of her earrings.

"What are yo— _Damon_!"

She squawked in protest as he pulled her up and tossed her over his shoulder, jaw set.

"Are you _kidding_ me?" she gritted out as he veered around and set off toward the living room, squirming against his grip.

He dropped his head back to call out to the rest of the apartment. "We're off to the Gallows, friends!"

" _Damon_ —"

"If we're not back in a few hours, call the National Guard!"

"I don't even have fucking shoes on!"

"Tell the world we died like heroes!"

He heard the sound of footsteps behind them as Stefan emerged from the kitchen and Caroline came down the hall, but he swept through the front door before they could slow him down, kicking it shut behind him—he was getting to Kimono's at 7-o-fucking-clock.

"This is _ridiculous_ ," Bonnie seethed as he carried her down the hallway, shoving herself onto her elbows to try and worm her way out of his grip. "At least let me get a pair of shoes!"

"You can get them afterwards."

"After we go in!?"

"Yeah, just say you forgot them."

"Who forgets their shoes!?"

He scoffed as he turned the corner toward 2A. "You really think Kiosk is going to care? Dude doesn't exactly use a universal metric for defining what's normal."

"I'm not going into that apartment barefoot," she hissed, and he tightened his grip as he approached the door.

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm—"

He knocked on the door and dropped her onto the ground—she immediately shoved him back, pushing a mass of curls out of her flushed face. "I don't know who the _hell_ you think you are," she growled, head a solid foot below his, and despite the sallow hallway lighting and homicidal scowl, he was struck by how beautiful she looked—it was the first direct view of her face he'd really gotten, "but I'm not about to let some Paleolithic friggin' _manchild_ throw me over his shoulder and tell me what to—"

The click of the lock cut her off and he quickly whirled her around, pulling her petite frame against him in a rush of heat.

"Remember, we're in love."

"Fuck you."

His lips twitched as the door swung open in a burst of light.

* * *

Stefan didn't really know what he'd expected after Bonnie and Damon left for their dinner with Kai. He probably shouldn't have expected anything. Concern, maybe, over the fact that his best friend was in the process of being wined and dined by a legitimate lunatic. Guilt, over how he'd left things with Damon this afternoon.

But instead, all he had was this quiet, low-lying buzz of anticipation.

Anticipation over the silence around him, the looming space. In the wake of the past few days, where everything had been a crammed, chaotic blur of four loud personalities trying to navigate around each other, the tiny living room felt almost cavernous around him now.

Anticipation over the stretch of time in front of him that he had to fill, time where he was cooped up in Bonnie's apartment without Bonnie, without distraction, a lone collection of lanky limbs in her favorite armchair.

Anticipation over the fact that he wasn't alone. Not even close. And if he pricked his ears a bit, he could hear Caroline moving in her room. See her shadow cut across the line of light below her door. It'd been almost an hour since Bonnie and Damon had left, and after initially disappearing into her room without a word, she hadn't shown even the slightest intention of coming out.

Which was fine, he just… he wasn't sure what to think. Probably nothing. Them having the apartment to themselves didn't mean it was some opportunity they needed to pounce on or anything, he obviously knew that, he just…

He shook his head, clearing the clutter and forcing himself to refocus on the case file in his hand—the only thing he needed to be thinking about tonight was making a dent in the mountain of paperwork waiting for him back on his desk. That was it. That was in his control.

He blinked a few times to sharpen his eyes, narrowing them in the scattered light of the table lamp beside him. He read the first sentence once. Twice. Three times. Forgot the names. Forgot the claims. Switched the defendants. He let out a bright sigh, lifting a hand to scrub it over his face, and that's when he heard the creak of a door opening.

He slid his hand down, resting it against his mouth, and he immediately spotted her slim silhouette walking down the hallway. He fought down the flicker of expectation in his throat, the flare of warmth kindling in his veins. For all he knew, she was grabbing a glass of water or making herself one of her horrible smoothies.

He waited till she emerged into the darkness of the living room before dropping his hand and offering a quick smile. "He—"

The word caught in his throat as she slipped into the dim reach of the tableside lamplight.

She wasn't wearing anything but a silky, undone robe.

His entire body stiffened, ears dimming to a faint ring.

She approached the table slowly, hair slipping loose from her bun, skin blending so completely with the thin, filmy fabric that he couldn't tell which was which, and for a second, he was pretty sure he'd forgotten how to blink.

Move.

Breathe.

Any of it.

She reached forward and dropped the contract on the table between them, and the sound shocked his system enough to make him glance down—it was turned to the last page.

Her signature was beside his in loose, scripty letters.

Her voice was a murmur.

"Now what?"

* * *

 **A/N** : Unsurprisingly, this chapter is like 19K words of _not the dinner date and not the SC plot I came up with during the dinner date_ , so once again, I have nothing to say for myself. I think everything and everyone got some serious movement in this chapter, though, so I'm hoping that makes up for the fact that time moves at the most glacial of paces in this fic (LMAO like it's like 50K words per day at this point, if not more). Also, I don't know if it shows, but I tried to structure this like a movie/show in terms of jumping between scenes and trying to balance everything - again, this is kind of my first ever ensemble fic so let me know how that worked for you! Seriously fun stuff up ahead with Kai and an unexpected new guest (I called this chapter Two's Company so I could call the next one Three's a Crowd because both couples have a third wheel), so hope you're all excited for that. Anyway, breezy as it was, this chapter took a hot minute to write, so please drop me a line if you can!

Also, if you're looking for more content and haven't already, follow the SMA tumblr and twitter for sneak peeks, videos, gif sets, graphics, metas, etc. – the twitter is 6MorningsAfter (I post lots of snippets there as I'm writing) and the tumblr is sixmorningsafter (lots of more involved content there). Thanks, guys! Happy 2017!


	15. Three's a Crowd

Six Mornings After

Chapter Fifteen: Three's a Crowd

* * *

Fast.

Overwhelming and fast.

Stefan couldn't process anything else, his every nerve ending maxed out, synapses fried, lost in the frenzied blur of skin and limbs he was half of.

From the second that contract hit the table, they were on each other. Gruff. Magnetized. Messy. One blink and her robe was a puddle on the floor. Another blink and his clothes were beside it. Another and she was a naked charge of heat on top of him. Another and she was grinding into his palm with sharp, shuddering breaths. Another and she was swallowing his rasping groans as she worked the hardened length of him.

He was inside her before he even knew what was happening.

It was a slide of heat that blurred his vision, seared the edges off everything—for a second he wondered if the planet had veered off its axis. Then she started moving and he knew it had.

Fast.

Overwhelming and fast.

Long-nailed fingers dragged down his ribs. Thick sounds caught in his throat. His head knocked back sharply against the couchback, body vibrating, overwhelmed, his heart beating a wild, electric staccato in his chest. He struggled to process the fact that any of this was happening.

It'd been building for days and he still couldn't wrap his head around it.

Five days ago they could barely sustain a civil conversation.

Overwhelming and fast.

His thumb between her thighs sharpened her breath into blades. Her fingers in his hair were tight fistfuls. He felt himself nearing a flashpoint, the world dimming around him, every tendon in his body tightening with tension, and on instinct, he reached for her face and brought it down against his.

Their gazes locked in a flare of heat.

Confusion sparked in the wild haze of her eyes.

He immediately realized his mistake.

The intimacy of their position was instant, razing: his hand was fisted in her hair, nose pressed up against hers, their ragged breaths fluttering against each other's lips as she rode him. He could see the rings of grey in her eyes. Her dilating pupils were like expanding universes. Their bodies were caught, too worked up to break out of the accidental intimacy, too close to the edge to stop now.

He tried to will himself to push her back, to give her the space he knew she wanted, but he was transfixed by the raw kaleidoscope of emotions playing out on her face. She was racing back and forth between disorientation and pleasure, eyelashes fluttering and pitchy sounds clawing up her throat, falling apart against the friction of his thumb.

Overwhelming and fast.

Overwhelming and faster.

Overwhelming and a blur.

He wanted to kiss her but he couldn't look away.

She was blooming, defenseless, mouth opening and closing in soundless gasps as their slick bodies moved together. He brushed his thumb over her parted lips, completely intoxicated, and her eyes flared open, bright with something wild, something like accusation, but before he could place it, her back suddenly arched, fingers digging hard into his skin.

She came undone with a sound that burned out every nerve in his body.

It branded his ears, raw, vulnerable, throaty, a sound he immediately knew he'd never forget.

He unraveled in the echo.

And then there was just breathing.

Whistling wind and deep, unsteady breathing.

* * *

To be honest, Damon had expected pretty much anything from Kai's apartment. Shaved baby doll heads on the walls. An exotic bird emporium. Furniture made out of human bones. A framed collage of Missing Children ads. An entire room of blinking furbies. Aliens. Dinosaurs. Whatever. What he _hadn't_ expected was to walk into a friggin' HGTV Christmas special.

The place was decked the fuck out _._ Garland hung all over the living room, gold and glittering, accented with large, loopy red bows. A roaring fire was burning behind a string of brightly colored stockings, casting a warm glow over all the wool throws and cozy holiday pillows. A giant tree twinkled by the snowy bay window. Mistletoe winked from the doorways. Frank Sinatra was crooning about having a merry little Christmas.

And somehow, it was a hundred times more unsettling than the shaved baby doll heads would've been.

"On the rocks?" Kai prompted, busy fixing them drinks from a vintage bar cart that looked like it'd come straight off the Titanic. "Or straight up?"

"Neat," Damon replied, frowning up at the ceiling—was that a toy train zipping around the room? He nudged Bonnie and nodded at it and she pointedly ignored him.

"Sorry about the lack of shoes," she ventured, her voice an entertaining blend of embarrassed and cutting. "I was in the middle of putting them on when Australopithecus Afarensis here dragged me out of the apartment."

"And not a second too soon," Kai said, clucking his tongue as he stirred the bourbon. "You knocked on my door 236 milliseconds before 7:01."

Damon shot her a smug look and she kept her stare trained forward, jaw jutting out in annoyance. He wasn't sure what it was about her face that made irritation look so counterproductively adorable, but she honestly just looked like a pissed off Pixar character. Maybe it was the button nose. "I love your apartment, by the way," she offered after a second, waving a hand around and making a point of pretending he didn't exist. "It's crazy gorgeous. Feels so much bigger than ours."

"Thanks! I decorated it this morning—spent four hours on something called Pinterest?" He whirled around with their drinks in hand and walked over to them, nose scrunched. "Cool site, but needs some serious quality control—I found an article about how to preserve corpses on there that was _super_ amateur. Merlot," he said, handing the wine to Bonnie, "and Johnny Walker, neat."

Damon took the glass with an arched brow, trying to reconcile the Martha Stewart impersonator side of him with the side that knew how to properly preserve corpses. "Thanks, bud."

His stare flickered a bit at the term 'bud', as if he'd never been called that before, and it seemed to distract him long enough to ignore the sudden streak of fur that came shooting across the room. Damon watched in mild confusion as a grey tabby cat sped out the front door.

"So," Kai said, reaching back for his own drink—a Shirley Temple with a curly straw, naturally—and lifting it in the air. "I think a toast is in order, no?"

"Uh," Bonnie said, glancing over to the door, "did you maybe want to get your cat, or...?"

Kai blinked. "What cat?"

"The one that just ran out the door?"

"Oh, that's not mine," he said pertly, lifting his drink up higher. "To friends!"

"To friends," Damon echoed, lifting his own drink and shooting Bonnie a breezy smile, and she followed suit with a flat look. They all clinked glasses and Kai took a merry slurp.

"Alright," he sang, setting his drink down and clapping his hands together, "now if you'll just hand me your coats, we can—" his mouth snagged a bit as his stare drifted down their frames. "You don't have coats." Damon blinked at him—he was starting to look stressed, brows gathering into an anxious frown. "I'm supposed to offer to take your coats, but you don't—" he shook his head, "the next step was to ask you for your coats." He merely stared at their coatless torsos for a second before clearing his throat, gaze snapping back up to theirs. "You know what, no worries." His mouth broke into a tight smile. "We'll skip that part—just, uh… have a seat, and I'll go check on the stuffed mushrooms."

Damon slid a bemused stare to Bonnie, who was watching a frantic Kai disappear into the kitchen with a wary look. He waved a hand at the couch. "Ladies first."

Her eyes narrowed as they finally deigned to meet his. "Conveniently discovered chivalry, have you?"

"I'm always chivalrous."

"You threw me over your shoulder and dragged me here."

"You really need to get over that." She turned to face him with a scoff as he pressed on cockily. "Plus, he was clearly timing us, so that move probably saved your life. _Boom_ —extra gallantry."

"Extra bullshit."

"I'm basically your knight in shining armor."

"Villain origin story."

"Why, 'cause I'm turning you to the dark side?" She rolled her eyes as he began sidling closer, waggling his eyebrows and taking advantage of the shifting context. "Making the good girl go bad?"

"Making the good girl go violent," she corrected, tilting her head back to smile at him, and his lips flickered.

"I can dig violent." He flicked at one of her curls with an absent knuckle. "Kind of our thing, isn't it?"

"We don't have a thing."

"We totally have a thing."

" _I_ have brain damage from mainlining tequila; 'we _'_ have nothing."

"I think you should just admit we have a thing."

"But actually, now that we have a second—"

"I mean, you don't have to admit you _like_ it—"

"—I think we should set some ground rules for tonight."

"—but you should at least admit it exists."

"Do you even know what rules are?" she asked, entirely ignoring him as her eyes fell into a squint. "Like, as a concept?"

"Why, are we putting rules on our thing?"

Her stare shot ceiling-ward in exasperation. "This isn't a thing."

"It's very thingy."

"Rule one—"

"Sorry, I just," he waved his drink around, "I can't hear you over the magnitude of our thing."

"—no unnecessary physical contact."

He hummed. "By whose definition of unnecessary?"

"Mine."

" _Mmm_ , see, that's tricky because how can I be expected to know what your arbitrary definition of something is?" he said, sucking air through his teeth. "Like I know we have a thing and all, but—"

"The stuffed mushrooms are fluffy and delicious," Kai announced as he swept back out of the kitchen, drawing both of their gazes, "just like me." He was beaming, seemingly back to his loony self after his mini-freak out about the coats, and Damon watched him cross the room with a bemused look. "Sit, friends," he sang, plunking himself into an armchair, "let's chit chat!"

Damon sighed and pressed an instinctive hand against Bonnie's back that she immediately surged away from, leaving it hanging up in the air. His lips twitched—wow.

"So, Kai," she ventured as she took a seat in the furthest possible spot from both of them, and Kai pulled his legs up and folded them against the armchair, clasping his hands together eagerly, "what, uh… what do you do for a living?"

"Oh, I work for the government."

Bonnie's brows flew up, alarm flickering over her face as Damon took the seat beside her. "Wow. That's, uh… what part?"

"Pentagon." She merely stared at him, wine glass in hand, fake smile plastered over her face. "Can't say a whole lot more than that, unfortunately—security clearance, you know how it is." He flashed them a toothy grin before reaching back for his Shirley Temple. "How's med school going?"

She looked startled that he knew. "Fine."

"Good! Dr. Hamidi's a real ball-buster, so make sure you study up before your Urology rotation."

"You—how do you… how does he…?" she trailed off as she shot a baffled glance at Damon, and he smiled pleasantly, setting his drink down on the coffee table.

"Still mad I came?"

"Damon, how's corporate life?" He glanced back at Kai, who was slurping away through his curly straw. "Any progress on the Mikaelson account? I bet Ric's still mad af you're jacking it from him—hashtag-move-on-dot-org, amirite?"

Damon merely blinked at him—his own boss didn't even know he was trying to land the Mikaelson account. He wasn't even sure _Mikaelson_ knew.

Kai's brow furrowed after a beat. "What? Was that too much? Too personal?" He sighed gustily. "They say to make light conversation, but it's hard to know what's 'light' when personal information's so readily available these days."

"Maybe just stick to social media," Damon offered.

"Oh, I got that all from your instagram." Kai frowned. "You posted a picture of a new coffee mug, and I mean," he snorted, "can't really get more obvious than that."

Damon's eyes fell into a squint. "Right." A beat, then, "You're terrifying." He turned to Bonnie. "He's terrifying."

She lapsed into a forced laugh, dropping a warning hand against his thigh. "He means that in a good way."

"Absolutely—do you have any interest in venture capital?" he asked, turning back to Kai in genuine question, and he shrugged.

"Not really."

"Well, if you ever do, let me know—I could put that apeshit brain to good u—" Bonnie dug her nails into his leg and he winced, shooting her a harassed look.

"Are you trying to get us killed?" she muttered pleasantly under her breath, stare friendly as it held Kai's over her wine glass, and he scoffed.

"Whatever happened to no 'unnecessary physical contact'?"

"That was necessary."

He watched her shoot Kai an everything's-fine-here smile for a second before shrugging. "Fine." He slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him, taking care to press as much of her stiff frame against his. Two could play at that game.

"So, Kooky pants," he said as he turned back to Kai, lips quirking as she began fidgeting against him, "any special someones in your life? I don't mean to pry, I've just got love on the mind ever since I met this one." He shot her a fond look and her lips flickered against a scowl.

"I have a date next week, actually."

"Oh, yeah?" Damon asked, gooey gaze sliding over her face in his best impression of 'lovesick idiot'. Or, you know, Stefan. Truth be told, it wasn't too hard when she was practically glowing in the golden firelight. "With who?"

"This guy I met at Sniper School."

"Sniper love." He looped a finger around one of her curls, smile widening as her jaw ticced. "Adorable. Isn't that adorable, babe?"

"Mmm," she said pleasantly, catching his hand with hers and intertwining their fingers menacingly tightly, "I'll show you adorable later."

He brought his other hand up to boop her nose. "Will you?"

Her eyes were blades. "Mm-hmm."

"Just like in those fluffy daydreams you were having earlier?"

"Even fluffier."

"Aw," he said, dropping his head down to nuzzle her neck, "you're going to give me a tooth ache, kid."

"I'm going to give you an everything ache, honey."

His stare darkened with interest as he pulled back a bit. "Promise?"

As if in preview, her nails bit into his skin. "Cross my heart."

"Hope to die?"

"Hope to maim."

His stare slipped down to her mouth. "You can maim me all you want in that dress."

"I can maim you all I want regardless."

"Are you trying to turn me on?"

"Like I'd have to try."

His amused gaze flicked back up to hers. She was staring at him with steady, smoked out eyes, and for a brief flicker, he was right back in her room, right back to last night, right back to that window with the hot mess version of her grinding into his lap, covering him in deceitfully light kisses, fully aware she was making him fall apart.

His blood started humming in his veins, the air heating a bit around him.

Honestly, it wasn't the first time.

Glitters of the girl she was last night had been unpredictably flickering over her throughout the whole day, he'd noticed. Flashing in and out. Grabbing him by the throat when he least expected it. He'd assumed that everything she'd done had been a product of drunken rage, but here she was, sober as can be, eying him with embers of the exact same cocky, shit-starter stare she'd debuted on him yesterday.

He was starting to wonder which version of her was actually the alter ego.

"You two must have a crazy sex life."

They both turned to look at a momentarily forgotten about Kai. He was chewing on the end of his straw, cross-legged and slouched back against the armchair. "Like I'm just imagining all the clawing and borderline sadism and it's…" he lapsed into a bright chuckle, "it's pretty nuts."

After a few seconds of thick silence, his expression faltered again.

"Too personal?"

Bonnie took a large swig of her wine. "This is going to be a long night."

* * *

Caroline felt the weight of the room sinking into her skin.

The air was thick. Heavy. Dizzy with the musk of skin and sex. Ringing with the memory of sharp breaths and rasping moans.

Vibrating with the tension of reality setting back in.

She was still on top of Stefan, eyes closed, breaths uneven, entirely unable to move. She wasn't sure how long it'd been since they'd finished—maybe a minute, maybe more—but after that final moment where his head had fallen back, eyes flooding and body unraveling under hers, they'd both just stayed there.

Wrapped around each other.

Equal parts melted and stiff.

Both aware that things had happened that were decidedly not supposed to.

She'd thought an aggressive approach would remove all the risk. Kill any potential intimacy. She'd outlined it all in her head: make him sweat it out so that the anticipation worked him up, slink out in almost nothing and make him horny enough to want it rough, climb him so that she had full control of the pace, and _finally_ ride this godforsaken impulse out.

Easy.

Straightforward.

No room for error.

Except that he was inherently an error.

Everything about him was a goddamn error.

Like the way he thought it was totally okay to hold her like he was protecting her from something. Or run his hands over her skin like it was made of silk. Or slip in swift, instinctive kisses that softened all of the roughness out of everything. Or pull her head against his and breathe her in as they moved together. Or watch her come undone with rapt looks, like he couldn't imagine looking away for anything in the entire goddamn world.

She felt her skin charging with anger, breaths taking on a sharp edge.

He'd known what he was doing.

He had to have known.

He had to have seen how it was affecting her, how destabilizing it was.

Her stomach twisted, head trying to block out the memory of that last orgasm: his thumb ghosting over her lips, green gaze spellbound, mixing carnal heat with suffocating intimacy and overwhelming her so much she'd cried out in the clamor.

She swallowed tightly.

No.

 _Fuck_ this.

She told him what not to do and he did it all anyway.

She slipped herself off him, stubbornly ignoring the role she played in all of it and dropping her feet to the floor. Her gaze cast around for her robe, body shaky, and upon finding it she slipped it on and tied it tightly, facing away from him. Her fingers were trembling. She tried to shake the irrational emotions burning through her—she was overreacting.

It wasn't that big of a deal.

Irritating, frustrating—absolutely, like how hard was it to follow directions?

But she didn't feel that.

She felt vulnerable. Unsettled. Razed.

"Caroline," she heard him venture after a beat, throaty, a little hesitant, and she jumped in before he could continue.

"Um, so that was," she blinked back the sting in her eyes, shoving a tight hand through her hair, "interesting." She heard rustling behind her, likely him getting to his feet and throwing on some kind of clothes, and her shoulders tensed, hands instinctively coming up to rub her arms. "I mean, there were some pretty damn loose interpretations of our contract going on there."

She heard him clear his throat behind her. "I know."

"Was I, I don't know," she shrugged sharply, back resolutely to him, heart racing in her chest, "unclear earlier or—"

"No."

"Did I not hammer the rules in hard enough?" she pressed, trying to keep her voice calm, and he sighed.

"No."

"Then what the fuck, Stefan?" she snapped before she could help it, panicked stare fixed to the floor as her skin burned with anxiety. "Like what sudden brain tumor made you think any of that was what we'd agreed to?"

His voice was tired. "I know it wasn't."

She scoffed. "So you just willfully ignored everything I said."

"No, I—" she heard him cast around for the right words for a second before sighing. "Not on purpose."

"But you did."

"I… got caught up."

"Caught up."

"Yeah, Caroline, caught up," he replied, voice taking on a flicker of frustration. "This is all new to me, and I didn't—I mean, you weren't exactly—" She shifted to the side as he took a step toward her, keeping her back to him, and he slowed to a halt. "I just didn't anticipate some things. It won't happen again."

"Yeah, it won't, because if you can't follow the contract, there is no again," she bit back, attempting to sound cold and severe, but her stupid voice wavered, and he seemed to catch it because she felt him tense behind her.

A thick stretch of silence followed.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. "You okay?"

She shrugged him off and turned away sharply. "I'm fine."

"Caroline."

She felt absurd, ridiculous tears burning at her eyes—why the _hell_ was she crying?— and she furiously tried to blink them back. "I'm going to go—" she shook her head, hair falling back in her face, "work in my room for a bit, so just—"

"Hey," he said, catching her elbow as she made to take off, and she pulled out of his grip.

"I'm fine, Stefan."

"You don't sound fine."

The lump in her throat grew and she felt idiotic. "I said _I'm fine_."

"Then turn around and look at me."

God, she just wanted her room.

"Caroline."

She closed her eyes as he took her by the shoulders, desperately willing her tears away, and he slowly coaxed her around to face him, hands unbearably gentle. By the time she was facing him, his grip had tensed.

"Caroline, please look at me." His voice was quiet, urgent.

She ignored him, trying to get a hold of herself, furious with her own lack of control.

"I really," he swallowed tightly, "I need you to walk me through this."

Deep breaths. In and out, just like Bonnie had shown her.

"Because right now, all I'm processing is that we just had sex and you're very much not okay with it."

She felt her nostrils flaring against the building urge to cry—he needed to stop.

"And that I might've somehow, I don't know, hurt you."

The skin of her face tightened—his voice was practically molten with worry, like the idea of hurting her was the worst thing in the world, and _God_ , could he stop, could he just _please_ stop?

"And I—" he faltered, and suddenly she felt his hand slip up to her face, "the last thing I wanted to do was—"

"Fucking hell, Stefan, just _stop_!" she finally cracked, voice raw and wavering, eyes flying open in wild, red-rimmed accusation. He reared back a bit, alarmed by the outburst, and she knocked his hand off her cheek. "Stop with the hands and the voice and the goddamn everything, just stop! _Stop_!"

He looked bewildered and she whirled around, shoving a tight hand through her hair.

"I don't need it, I don't need you play hero for me again, I'm not drunk and vulnerable and crying in a bathtub, I just need you to leave me alone and give me some space to think, because this?" She turned around and waved a frantic hand at her messy state, rogue tears flashing down her cheeks. "This has nothing to do with you!"

He held her stare with a conflicted one of his own, and for a second, she thought he was going to back off. Do his patient, understanding Stefan thing and leave her alone. But then his jaw clenched. "I don't believe that."

She scoffed. "What?"

"I don't believe that this has nothing to do with me."

"I'm _telling you_ it doesn't."

"And I'm telling you that we just had sex and now you're crying and desperate to get away from me and saying it has nothing to do with me like there's a chance in _hell_ I could buy that," he exclaimed, his calm exterior cracking, and she shook her head, desperate gaze dropping to the floor.

He took a slow step closer. "Caroline, what the hell happened?" His voice was frank, urgent. "Explain this to me, because yeah, I fucked up a bit, but I honestly don't understand why that'd make you this upset. Annoyed? Sure. Angry, even. But you—" he instinctively reached up to touch her and she took a step back, making him drop his hand with an alarmed look. "You honestly look terrified."

Terrified.

Her skin flooded with nerves at the word, at how surprisingly close it was to describing what she was feeling. Her throat was tight, skin hot, instincts clamoring in full-on fight-or-flight, and for what? Honestly? For _what_? Because he didn't kiss her a certain way? Because he held her too close? Because he looked at her too intensely? Because he did the same things hopeless guys she dragged home from bars did all the time, things she never reacted to with anything more than an eye roll?

Why was this any different?

 _You know why._

Her nails dug into her palms.

"Did I…" his mouth closed and then opened again, gaze searching, "did I do something that reminded you of Matt, or—"

No.

Yes and no.

Not the parts he was thinking of.

She pressed her lips together tightly, the tear tracks cooling on her cheeks, and slowly, tentatively, he eased forward and took her shoulders in his hands. "Caroline," he murmured, and the sound fluttered down her spine in a wash of warmth, the same way it had the night she'd broken down in the hallway, the same way it had when she'd kissed him in her room. His voice was quiet, uneasy. "Why does it feel like you're afraid of me?"

She merely stood there for a beat, trembling slightly, breathing in the warmth of him like it was some kind of drug. She could feel the subtle callouses on his hands. She saw him again with the camp kids and the guitar. She saw him cooking breakfast with the little girl on his shoulders. She saw him easing her onto their bed as their kids laughed out in the hallway.

Her throat tightened.

"I'm not afraid of you," she heard herself murmur after a beat, voice shaky. Her reddened stare slowly fluttered up to meet his, and the vulnerability felt like knives in her lungs. "I'm afraid of me."

His brows drew in, stare dark on hers. She willed him not to press for more, not to ask questions she wasn't ready to face, because honestly, that was all she could give him right now. Hell, the only reason she could even say that was because he looked genuinely scared that he'd done something horrible to her, that he was just another Matt in sheep's clothing, and she hated the idea that her inability to control her emotions made him believe that.

"What does that—"

Her whole body stiffened, stare fixing on something over his shoulder, consuming emotions drying up so suddenly it was like a flash drought. "Stefan."

He sighed. "Caroline, I know you don't want to talk about this, but— "

"No, _Stefan_ ," she hissed, shoving at his chest and nodding her head behind him, hastily blinking the tears out her eyes, and his brow furrowed, stare shifting over his shoulder.

He was silent for a second.

Likely because a friggin' cat was staring back at them.

* * *

If there was one thing Bonnie had learned about challenging the irresistibility of a shameless narcissist she was inexplicably into right before being stuck on a fake date with said shameless narcissist, it was this: _don't._

Seriously. Don't.

Because what happens is that said narcissist takes every available opportunity to prove that he is, in fact, kind of fucking hard to resist, and he does it all under the guise of being super committed to his fake boyfriend role.

First, there was the touching. All the touching. Lazy patterns drawn onto the skin above her knee. A loose twine of his fingers around the curls at the back of her neck. They were casual touches, innocent as hell by what she imagined Damon's standards to be, but all that did was make it worse because she couldn't really bitch him out—they were pretty standard boyfriend fare.

Except for the fact that they carried an unmistakable current of 'imagine what else these fingers can do' and they both knew it.

Then, there was the constant proximity—the press of his leg against her thigh, the weight of his arm draped around her shoulders. She couldn't seem to do much of anything without him slinking up to her, a wall of luring heat, every inch the smitten boyfriend who couldn't quite keep his hands to himself. And _again_ , she couldn't exactly fault him for it because it did keep Kai away. It just… also kept her ability to think straight away.

And then there was the commentary.

 _Christ,_ the commentary.

Goading things grinned into her ear. Flowery declarations with double meanings galore. When Kai asked how they got together, he replied with a pointblank 'Bonnie's just someone who really grabs you by the balls, you know?' When he offered to pick out a champagne from Kai's cellar, he asked if she 'wanted to come' so pointedly that she choked on her wine. She didn't even know how he did it. It was honestly like a talent at this point.

She also didn't know how the hell Kai had a friggin' _wine cellar_ in an apartment, but that was a separate issue.

"Any champagne preferences, Bon?" Damon called out as he hovered by the door to the cellar, innocent stare flickering over to hers. "You feeling dry or wet?"

"Can I talk to you for a sec?" she gritted out, pushing herself off the couch and flashing Kai a pert smile as she passed. "I'll be right back."

"Coolsies," he replied as he fiddled with an all black rubix cube, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth.

Damon frowned as she approached him, stare fixed past her. "Is his rubix cube all one color?"

"It has microvariations," Kai called over his shoulder, as if it was totally normal to have heard his mutter from twenty feet away.

Damon shrugged. "'Course it doe— _ow_!"

Bonnie grabbed him by the collar and yanked him into the stairwell with a gruff pull, pulling the door half-shut behind them. "'You feeling _dry or wet_?'" she hissed, pinning him with a sharp look, and his expression quickly slipped from harassed to sly in the shadowed light.

"Caught that, did you?"

"Oh, I caught a lot of things," she murmured, and he crossed his arms and settled against the wall, clearly anticipating a rant. "Now, I understand you don't have a ton of experience with relationships, and after thirty minutes of this fake date, I can see why, but just a heads up: people in love don't generally communicate exclusively in sexual innuendos."

"You've been in love?"

She faltered at the unexpected pivot. "What?"

His brows lifted. "Have you ever been in love," he repeated, casual as can be, and she merely blinked at him, irritated by the question.

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"I mean, you're talking like you're the authority on it, and I just realized I didn't know, so." She stalled for a second, unsure why she was hesitating to answer—of course she'd been in love. She'd loved Jeremy, she'd loved Luka, they'd exchanged 'I love you's all the time, and yet for some reason, the way he was looking at her made her feel like she was lying.

"I—" she cleared her throat, annoyed, "I mean, yeah, obviously."

"Mm." There it was, the 'if you say so' glitter, bright and languid in his eyes.

Her stare thinned in annoyance. "Have you?"

His brow quirked. "Is that a joke?"

"No, but you know what is? You acting like you know more about it than I do."

"I never said I did."

"Your face is saying it."

"My face is mute."

"Your face is chatty."

"How can my silent face be chatty?"

"Ask your chatty eyes."

"My chatty—" he lapsed into a chuckle at the ridiculous reply, staring at her like she was some kind of alien. "Are you drunk again?" Her eyes narrowed and he lifted his palms in surrender. "Okay, fine, sorry if my 'chatty eyes' offended you."

"No more slutty comments," she insisted, ignoring his mocking apology, and his lips pursed. "Largely because they're annoying, but also because you're going to blow our cover."

"Oh, _I'm_ going to blow our cover?"

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know, what does it mean, Ms. Squirms Like An Earthworm Anytime I'm Within A Foot of Her?"

She scoffed out a laugh. "I do not _squirm like an—"_ her voice cut off as he took an unexpected step toward her, hands coming up to rest on either side of her head, boxing her against the wall. She immediately tensed up, the warmth of him hitting her like a heat wave, spiking her pulse to a rapid staccato.

She jumped when the bare skin of her back hit the cool brick.

His brows ticked up. "Earthworm."

Her frustrated gaze snapped ceiling-ward. "I'm not an earthworm."

"I mean, I get it, you're trying to keep yourself from pouncing on me—"

"Jesus," she muttered, eyes rolling to the back of her head.

"—and that's kind of a tall order, considering how irresistible you won't admit you find me—"

Someone kill her.

"—but honestly, if we're going to sell this whole young and in love fairytale, you're going to have to do a little better—"

" _I_ have to do better?"

"—cause I'm not sure I can pull off a whole night of picking up your slack."

" _My_ slack."

"Your slack."

"You literally told Kai you call me Bon Bon because you can't decide which one you like to eat more."

He lifted a baffled hand. "Do boyfriends not go down on their girlfriends?" She faltered at the sudden mental image invading her head, a remnant of a particularly destabilizing laundry room fantasy she'd had about him, and he mistook her pause for hesitation. "Wait a minute." His eyes thinned, stare slowly filling with amused disbelief. "Did Backwards Dudebro Cap never—"

"No, oh my God, of course he did, I just—" she waved a hand, shaking her head rapidly. "That's not the point. None of that is the point. The point is that we're selling love, not sex."

"Correction: I'm selling sex, you're selling neither."

"Well, then we both need to step it up."

His eyes took on a gleam. "So you admit you're being wormy."

She held his gaze for a moment before heaving a tired sigh. "There's a chance I'm being a little wormy."

"Super wormy."

"Super's aggressive."

" _Eh_ , I wouldn't—"

"Can we just," she lifted a hand and closed it into a fist, signaling for silence, and his lips twitched, "focus?"

"Fine. Instruct me, Love Yoda."

She took in a deep breath, trying to gather her thoughts. "Okay, so—"

" _I wanna knooooow what love issssss_ ," he sang suddenly, face scrunching with affected emotion. " _I want you to shooooooow meeeeeee_." She blinked at him and he frowned. "No?"

"No."

" _I wanna feeeeel what lo—"_

She flattened a hand over his mouth. "We're focusing now."

He smiled against her palm.

"Step one: nix the sexual commentary."

"Alweady coffered dat," he said, voice muffled by her fingers, and she dropped her hand.

"Step two: grow up and stop treating this like some opportunity to prove you're irresistible."

His stare took on a baffled glint. "What makes you think I'm doing that?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Please."

"Please _what_?"

"Innocent doesn't work on you, Damon."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Like your entire face is rebelling against it—you look like you're about to have a stroke."

"I'm just trying to play my part, kid," he replied, lips ticking up at the ends. "I can't help it if your fantasy-prone brain is reacting to it in unwanted ways." She rolled her eyes. "Speaking of which, let's talk about your areas for improvement—namely, looking like you're cool sharing a zipcode with me?"

She chewed the inside of her cheek at the call-out. "Done."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, it's easy."

"So if I get a little closer," he said, bending his arms to draw inward, cutting the space between them in half. She immediately felt the air thicken a bit around her. "You can play it cool?"

She tilted her chin up, stubbornly keeping her expression neutral. "Yep."

"And if I…" he slipped a hand down to finger one of her curls, "played with your hair a bit, you could look fine with that, too?'' Her blood began humming as his knuckles brushed over her collarbone, his face shadowed in the dark stairwell, lit only by the faint light slipping in from the half-ajar door.

She shrugged stiffly. "No problem."

"Great. And if I…" her skin flared with heat as fingers trailed down her clavicle, sliding down to the pendant dangling between swell of her breasts, stare fixed on hers, "fiddled with the jewelry I'd lie about having gotten you, that's…."

She blinked slowly, head starting to get fuzzy as hell. "Illogical, since we've been stuck in the apartment the whole time."

"Mm." His finger slipped off the pendant, catching on the neckline of her dress. "Good catch."

Her stare dropped to the curve of his mouth, the unwanted magnetism building at an alarming rate. "Always."

"Well," he said after a thrumming beat, lips flickering as he made to pull back, "I guess you're goo—"

Honestly, it was less of a kiss and more of a 'fuck you'.

That's what she told herself.

With no reason at all.

And in her defense, they were playing the 'how much physical contact can you take' game, so technically, she was just proving a point when she dug her fingers into his collar and pulled his mouth onto hers. The rush of heat was lobotomizing and immediate. His hand dropped to her waist to pull her against him in a bite of fingers, lips hot and whiskey-spiced against hers, and for a second, she completely forgot where they were, what they were doing, and why this was incredibly stupid.

She just wanted more.

More heat. More skin. More him.

As if hearing her, he hoisted her up and backed her into the wall, deft hands slipping up the hem of her dress. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him flush against her, fingers curling into fists against his shirt—everything was blurring. Her blood felt electric. She slid her hands into his stupidly perfect hair and relished the feeling of ruining it, of roughing him up, of cracking that unflappably blithe exterior till he was all rasps and moans. He had her dress scrunched around her waist in seconds, thumbs gliding beneath the elastic hem of her underwear, and her head rolled back as he kissed a hot trail down the column of her throat. He was overwhelming. Combative. The friction of his mouth was a stricken match, lighting her up, and God, she couldn't remember the last time someone made her feel this charged, this impulsive.

An abrupt image of a dingy bathroom stall with a busted overhead light overcame her, and suddenly, the hands on her thighs were older. Manipulative. Sticky from hours of rolling marijuana. She could smell the phantom weed in the air, feel the unwashed hair between her too young fingers turn spiky and short, and a cloud of nausea washed over her.

Of course she remembered.

And it was exactly why she didn't do things like this anymore.

"Um," she managed between breaths, slipping her hands down to his chest to push him back, and he broke away from her throat in a sudden loss of heat. Flooded blue eyes stared back at her. Aquiline nose. Clean-shaven jaw. Damon. He felt innocent by comparison, and it was a strange realization. "I, uh—" she cleared her throat, trying to get her head to stop spinning in the thick air. "Sorry, I was just—" she grabbed his hands with hers and pushed them back down her legs, body a little stiff, "I was just making a point."

"A point," he echoed after a beat, voice thick with arousal, and she ignored what the gravelly quality did to her pulse.

"Yeah."

"Pretty sure you made a few."

She squirmed a bit against his grip and he eased her back down to her feet. "I just wanted to show you that, you know," she swallowed thickly, yanking the hem of her dress down and running a hasty hand over her hair, "I can handle whatever you throw at me, so don't worry about that."

He stared down at her as she straightened herself out, and she could practically feel the confusion veering into amusement. Admittedly, it wasn't the best excuse.

"So you're saying that if I pull something like that in front of Kai, you'll be cool with it?"

Shit.

"I mean," she scoffed, the sound thin and unconvincing, "I can't imagine it ever being necessary, but if the situation called for it, yes."

He pursed his lips, eyes glinting with an impish quality that made her shoulders tense. "I'll keep that in mind."

"Keyword being necessary."

"Got it."

"As in 'no other way out of the situation'."

"Yep."

"As in—"

"Trouble in paradise, friends?" Kai's muffled voice called from the living room, slicing through their conversation, and Damon's brows ticked up.

"Better get back out there, Merriam Webster."

She sighed, pushing a wayward curl off her face. "Don't take too long down here, okay?" She glanced down at the darkness at the foot of the stairs, realizing rather belatedly that this cellar was creepy as hell.

"Why, you worried about me?"

Her stare flicked back to his—it was bright beneath playful brows. "Please."

"You are."

"I'm worried about _me_."

"You care about my safety."

"I care about not being alone with Kai for an extended amount of time."

"I'm touched."

"You're dumb," she countered, shaking her head as she made to leave, and a loose grip around her wrist stopped her.

"If anything happens while I'm down here, yell." Her brows drew inward as her stare slid back to his—his voice was void of any of its usual flippancy. "I'll hear you."

"Are _you_ worried about _me_?"

His eyes held hers for a lingering moment before rolling. "I have to be—you're miniature."

Her glitter of endearment flared into annoyance. "I'm a totally normal height."

"Yeah, for like a poodle or a nightstand."

"Well, nightstand-sized or not, I handled you pretty easily yesterday, sooo—"

He scoffed. "I let you handle me."

"Whatever, bro."

She turned around to leave and he caught her wrist again.

"Seriously. Anything at all. Yell."

She stared at the long fingers wrapped around her skin for a second before meeting his gaze. "Alright, mush ball."

His eyes lit with annoyance at the resurrected nickname as she once again set off for the hallway.

"Hey, real quick—"

Her lips couldn't help but flicker at the sound of his voice, and she slowly leaned back in from the doorway. "Yes?"

"You never answered my question."

"What question?"

"Dry or wet?" Her face fell as his cracked into a grin, and she pushed the door open with a glower. "For the champagne!"

"I hope you fall down the stairs," she grumbled over her shoulder, and she heard him chuckling behind her.

"All good?" Kai asked as she wandered back into the living room, and she heaved a gusty sigh.

"Yeah, everything's—"

Her eyes widened as they snagged on the roasted chicken he was carrying on a tray, seemingly en route to the dining room table. It was hanging upright. On a wooden cross. With a crown of thorns. Like Jesus.

"Is that—" she cleared her throat, blinking a bit, "is that a crucified chicken?"

"Yep!" he sang, glancing down at the tray with a gleeful smile. "I figured since chicken's so boring, the least I could do is spice it up with some holiday cheer—I call it Jesús Crisco."

She pressed her lips together, forcing the closest thing she could she could manage to a smile. "Wow."

"Festive, right?"

"It's… I mean…"

Suddenly Damon falling down the stairs felt a _lot_ less appealing.

* * *

"I don't want it here."

"Let me think."

"This is illegal!"

"Caroline."

"This is breaking and entering!"

"It's a _cat_."

"Cats aren't above the law, Stefan!"

"Actually, they—"

"What if it has fleas!?" she blustered, and Stefan's head fell back with a sigh.

"You don't kno—"

"What if it has worms?"

"Caroli—"

" _What if it has rabies!_?"

"Look, if anyone has rabies here, it's you, so can you please relax for a second and let me think? _"_ he replied, a little exasperated, and she held his stare with a harassed one of her own before crossing her arms in a huff. She glanced back over to the grey tabby carelessly exploring her apartment, visibly annoyed, and he took a second to try and sort through the chaotic mess of thoughts going on in his head.

Frankly, there was a lot he was wading through.

First, there was… well, the sex.

And honestly, that alone had been a lot to process.

More than it was supposed to be.

As in twenty minutes later his blood was still buzzing, but it didn't even matter because then there was her gut-punch of a reaction. The tears. The anger. The shaking. She'd looked horrified, he'd _felt_ horrified, and for a second there, he'd been scarily convinced he'd broken something in her. Something he couldn't identify, something he didn't even understand, but something he knew for a fact he wasn't worth breaking over.

In fact, that was all he could remember thinking in that moment: that none of it was worth it. The rush, the heat, the magnetism, the electricity—it was all worthless if the cost was having to watch her crack. He didn't want to be that guy and he didn't want her to be that girl. He'd rather simmer from a mile away as she smiled than ignite in the heat of her as she burned.

And then she'd told him she was scared of herself, and hell if that hadn't thrown him for a loop, because one, he didn't know what that meant, and two, if he had to guess what it meant, he kind of felt like it meant he wasn't the only one feeling things he didn't know how to process. Like maybe they were both getting a little in over their heads here. Like maybe that contract hadn't just been for him.

Or maybe not—maybe it meant absolutely nothing, maybe she was just trying to get him leave her alone, he didn't know—all knew was that the possibility of it being the former flickered something in him.

Something stupidly, recklessly hopeful.

And then a cat showed up and she closed up like a lock, diving into the distraction like nothing had happened. Just like that. Candid and vulnerable to the snappy CEO of Massachusetts Pest Control in the blink of an eye. He'd tried to steer the conversation back to her but she wouldn't have it.

It was blindsiding, and if he was being perfectly honest, really frustrating, because even though he couldn't be sure where that conversation was heading, he couldn't shake the feeling that it was going _somewhere_. Somewhere definite. A conclusive landmark he could finally use to ground his understanding of where she was in all this. But instead, here they were, bickering over a cat, right back to drifting through Vague and Unproductive Confusion Town.

She didn't owe him answers. He knew that. He also knew that no one was forcing him to partake in any of this and he was free to back out if he didn't like it. Unfortunately, being aware of those realities didn't make them any more appealing, and he was struggling to keep his frustration with it from spilling into their current situation.

"Look, it's probably Kai's, let's just give it back," Caroline scoffed after a stretch of silence, waving at the cat, and he shot her a dark look.

"We're not giving that guy a live animal."

"Well, it's survived this long, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, and would clearly prefer the basement and wandering into unfamiliar apartments over living with him," he countered, and she let out a sharp sigh, conceding the point.

"Well, then maybe it's someone else's—we'll go door to door."

"Is anyone else in your building right now? It's Christmas break." She chewed her lip, expression annoyed, and he could tell the answer was no. "It's just for a few days."

"I'm not taking care of a cat."

"I'll take care of it."

"I don't want it living here."

"What do you have against cats?"

"I'm just not an animal person."

"Are you an anything person?"

She snorted. "What does that mean?"

"It means is there anything on the planet you don't avoid dealing with?"

The words were out of his mouth before he could check them, and despite her lack of verbal reaction, he knew they struck. Her expression faltered, the impatient indifference giving way to something else, something guarded. After a few seconds, she glanced away.

"Caroline," he sighed, voice softening a bit as he pushed a hand through his hair, "I mean, ten minutes ago you were crying."

She shrugged lightly. "And now I'm not."

"Right, but—"

"We can keep the cat."

His mouth fell closed, hand dropping back down to his side in a wash of surprise. _That's_ how badly she didn't want to talk about this? To the point that she was willing to completely 180 on the cat? Her voice was small, yielding, the readiness to compromise carrying a certain quiet desperation that her combativeness seemed to have been masking earlier, and for a second, he just stared at her.

"For now, I mean," she clarified, clearing her throat. When he still didn't respond, she averted her gaze to the cat—it was pawing at a lamp cord, oblivious as can be. "Do you know what kind it is?" Her voice was still uncharacteristically light, and he felt his determination to confront her fading in response.

"Pretty sure it's a tabby," he said after a few seconds. Maybe they could talk about it later. Probably not, but he just couldn't bring himself to push her more right now. "Might be a mix."

"Mm. Are those…" she waved an uncertain hand, and the tension in her stance flared an instinct in him to make her feel more comfortable, "friendly, or…"

"Uh, no, actually," he said, causing her stare to swing back up to his. "They can actually be pretty vicious." Her face took on a note of alarm, and he gave a deadpan shrug. "Easy to mistake for serial killers."

The worry drained from her expression as his eyes warmed with humor, and he caught a small twitch of her lips as she shook her head. "Not going to let that go, are you?"

"Nah."

"It looked a lot bigger in the dark."

His brow furrowed thoughtfully. "Not sure light works like that."

"It does."

"Okay."

Her lips flickered faintly at the corners, and after a moment, he caught the barest trace of a 'thank you' in her eyes. He knew it was for having let her change the subject, but honestly, he still didn't feel great about it. Getting to watch the tension slip off her shoulders was a pretty compelling consolation prize, though.

Not that it lasted long.

"Whoa."

She took a step back as the cat suddenly began approaching her. It was a scrappy little thing, striped and grey with big yellow eyes, and from the dainty build alone, Stefan suspected it was a female.

"Whoa, what is it—" She took another hasty step back, stare lighting with alarm, but the cat continued strolling right up to her, fearless tail flickering behind her. "Stefan," she called, backing up till she bumped into the armchair. "Stefan, help."

His mouth twitched in amusement. "You're fine."

"I'm not fine, it's coming right— _Stefan_ ," she hissed, climbing backwards onto the chair and pulling her legs up as the cat swooped under them. He couldn't help his chuckle—had she never been around a cat before?

"She likes you."

"No, she— _"_ a shriek cut through her words as the cat hopped up onto the arm rest, and he burst out laughing as she shot out of the chair and ran straight toward him. She caught him by the shaking shoulders and thrust him in front of her like a shield. "Do something!"

"What do you want me to do?" he managed between laughs, and he felt her start squirming as the cat licked its paw.

"Tell it to leave me alone."

"How?"

"Aren't you like an animal whisperer!?"

" _What?"_

"I don't— _Stefan_!" Her hands dug into his shoulders as the cat leapt off the seat, taking a lazy second to survey the room, and he couldn't get over the fact that she actually thought he knew some cat version of Parseltongue. "Be helpful!"

"I'm sorry, I—" he stifled a laugh, "I just need a second to brush up on my Cat-ish, 'cause the meow for 'stop' is really similar to the meow for 'attack' and I don't want to get them confu—" he lapsed into another chuckle as she shoved at his shoulder, and the cat glanced over to them, curious.

"No," Caroline warned, tensing behind him. The cat arched into a luxuriating stretch before taking a step toward them. " _No, no, no, no—_ "

She pulled him backwards as the cat began wandering over, seemingly trying to walk them to Bonnie's room, and he reached back with a mirthful sigh to grab her by the arm. "Caroline, it's fine."

"No, it's not!"

"I promise it is," he said, slowly pulling her forward so that she wasn't hiding behind him, "just give her a chance to meet you."

"You mean a chance to _maul me_?"

He snorted at the melodrama. "She's like ten pounds."

"I don't— _Stefan_!"

"Easy," he said, hands dropping to her waist to hold her steady as the cat approached her feet. "Let her come to you."

"I can't see."

"What?"

"My eyes are closed—what's she doing?"

He laughed at the theatrics. "Open them."

"I don't want toaaaaaahhhh _I feel fur_."

"Relax," he said, absently running his thumb along her waist to calm her down, "she's twining around your legs."

" _Why_?"

"Because that's what cats do."

"I hate this," she whimpered, and his lips quirked at the misery in her voice.

"She's actually pretty cute." She didn't respond, chest rising and falling a little rapidly, and for a few seconds, he just stood behind her, breathing in the increasingly familiar flare of her lavender shampoo. It was a heady smell, piercing and soft at the same time, and much as he wanted to believe otherwise, he wasn't sure he'd be able to dissociate it from her after this was all over. "You should see for yourself."

"I'm good."

"Caroline."

"Look, our next door neighbor had a cat that was super mean and lunged at people and scratched up the hood of my mom's car and I just _don't like them,_ okay?"

His brows flicked up. "So you do have a history with cats."

"I—" she sighed, shaking her head. "I mean, I guess, I don't know, I just… I'm honestly not really big on animals, and I know that's probably like sacrilege to you, but it is what it is."

"Hey, my experiences are different than yours," he said, shoulders easing into a shrug. "You're allowed to feel however you feel." She was silent for a bit, still focused on trying to distract herself, and his voice slid into a probing tenor. "Have you ever considered, though, that maybe you've just met the wrong animals?"

She let out a dry laugh. "Did you just Not-All-Animals me?"

"I did." She shook her head as he smiled, shoulders still tense against his chest, and he glanced down at the cat—it was staring up at her with bright yellow eyes, tail flicking around curiously. "Look, all I'm saying is there's a cuddly little fur ball who seems really interested in getting to know you, and it'd be a shame to miss out on something good because you're lumping it in with one bad experience."

She didn't say anything at first, seemingly ignoring him, but after a few moments of silence, he felt her take a long, deep breath. And then she glanced down.

" _Wow_ , she is _right_ there—"

"Relax," he said, idly rubbing her side, and surprisingly, she actually seemed to ease a bit against his hand. It was strange to him, how thoughtlessly they were navigating each other's proximity at the moment. Like distantly, he was aware of how close they were. Aware of the thin fabric of her robe against his bare torso. Aware of the heat of her, of how intimately he knew it. Aware that less than half an hour ago, they'd been having sex about five feet away from where they were standing.

But for some reason, as all-consuming as that awareness should've been, he was far more focused on getting her to warm up to this cat. He wasn't even sure why. Maybe it was the idea of getting her to let in something she was afraid of. Maybe it was just the lure of seeing her actually enjoy something.

"Do you want to pet her?"

"Nope."

His lips quirked at the blunt response. "Then I'm going to pet her."

" _What_?"

"Hey there, pretty girl," he greeted, keeping one hand on Caroline's waist as he leaned down to offer his other one, and the cat immediately surged against his palm.

"Why are you encouraging her?"

"I'm just being friendly."

"She doesn't need friendly."

"Everyone needs friendly. Isn't that right, kitty cat?" he cooed, and the cat began purring in response, rubbing her head against his fingers.

Caroline grimaced. "I hate when people baby talk to their pets."

"Ignore her, she's just jealous," he continued cooing, and Caroline lapsed into a snort, shaking her head. She watched them for a few seconds before he shot her a sparkling stare. "Sure you don't want to get in on this?"

"Yep."

He arched a brow and she did the same, and after a few seconds, he felt her slowly slipping into considering it… until the cat suddenly leapt onto the coffee table and she jolted.

" _Yep_ , okay, that's my cue, I'm out," she said, throwing her hands up and whirling out of his grip, and he chuckled as she all but sped away. "Cat's all yours."

"Caroline."

"Nope."

He watched her disappear down the hallway with a wry look. "You're going to love this cat," he called after a beat, and his lips twitched at the exasperated scoff that came in return, followed by the sound of a door swinging shut.

He stared at the empty hallway for a beat, a flicker of disappointment clouding his amusement. She was holing herself up again. No answers, no understanding of where they stood, just more vagueness. More unresolved feelings. More of their weird, illogical magnetism that kept pulling them together despite the growing list of reasons why they should probably just stay apart.

Hell, he wasn't even sure if their contract was still in play.

A warbling meow drew his attention down, and the cat was staring up at him with a curious look, head cocked to the side. She looked oddly probing, as if demanding to know what was going on, and he dropped to a crouch with a low sigh, lifting a hand to scratch between her ears.

"Just as lost as you are, lady," he muttered, lips flickering half-heartedly as she slipped into an immediate purr. "Juuuuust as lost as you are."

* * *

Damon was really taking his sweet ass pimp time down in that wine cellar.

Not that Bonnie was worried. Or counting. Or even particularly bothered.

It was just an observation.

An observation that _maybe_ irked her a little bit, but only because she was alone up here with a guy who thought it was Christmasy to stigmata poultry, and wasn't the whole point of Damon tagging along on this thing for protection? Cause she didn't feel very protected. F minus on the protection scale.

She glanced at the clock on the stove display as she put something called 'Crème Bru-yay!' in the fridge for Kai. It'd been over twenty minutes. It didn't take twenty minutes to grab a bottle of champagne. She bit the inside of her cheek—what if something had happened to him?

Not that she was worried.

Obviously.

She closed the fridge with a sharp sigh and whirled around—Kai was less than a foot behind her. " _Jesus_!"

She instinctively backed into the fridge door and he plunked his hands on either side of her head, hitting her with a toothy grin. "Heya, Bon."

She pressed a hand against her racing heart. "Kai, you can't just—" her eyes flashed with alarm as they caught on the bloody butcher knife sticking out of his left hand. " _What the hell are you doing_?"

"Flirting."

Her horrified stare snapped back over to him. "What?"

"I'm practicing for my date next weekend—gotta bring my A-game, cause he's smokin' hot." He frowned thoughtfully. "Not as hot as you, but close."

Her wide-eyed gaze was back on the knife. "Congrats."

"So how am I doing?"

"With what?"

"The flirting—I'm going for like rude and domineering with a fun spritz of not respecting you as a human being."

Her baffled stare tapered. " _Why_?"

"'Cause according to the top two hundred most OMG-worthy ships as ranked by Buzzfeed, that approach has the biggest appeal to your gender, age, and sexuality demographic," he said, shoulders lifting into a shrug. "I ran stats."

She merely blinked at him, still very much aware of the knife. "Yeah, I don't really think that translates well into real life."

"No?"

"'Fraid not."

"It wasn't like aggressive and sexy?"

"Definitely got some aggressive."

"What about sexy?"

"Kinda drowned out by the aggressive."

"Weird."

"Might have something to do with the knife in your hand."

His stare glided over to the blocky blade pinned up against the fridge and his brow furrowed. "You think?"

"A little."

"Then ignore the knife—what if I was like," his pleasant expression suddenly sharpened as he took a sidling step closer to her, lips flickering creepily, "Hey, lil mama, wanna swap kidneys?"

She reared her head back as far as it could go. "Still aggressive."

His face cracked. "Really?"

"Mm-hmm."

He frowned, glancing off with a genuinely puzzled look. "I practiced this in the mirror for hours—I studied so many movies."

"You know, maybe I'm an outlier," she offered over-brightly, slowly trying to edge out of his grip, and he merely continued muttering.

"Am I going to have to nuke Buzzfeed? I'd need to fix my fission tank."

"Maybe I'm just too fixated on the whole bloody-butcher-knife-two-inches-away-from-my-face thing and giving you bad advice—you should try it on someone else."

His shoulders lifted into a light shrug. "I don't really know anyone else."

She paused for a second. He was staring at her with oddly childlike look, blank and a little awkward, and her brows slowly dove into a furrow—was that… was he… saying he… didn't have any friends?

No.

 _No._

 _Bonnie, NO_.

She felt the beginnings of her stubborn empathy stirring, rearing its fluffy Hufflepuff head, and she doggedly tried to fight it off. Seriously, who went from Hannibal to lost puppy in the blink of a friggin' eye like that? It wasn't possible. It wasn't realistic. And this was _Kai—_ she was probably playing right into some master plan of his to take over the world with an army of emus.

After a few seconds, though, she sighed, easing back against the fridge with a resigned look. "Look, why don't you try something simple, like…" she waved an absent hand, "Hi, I'm Kai, nice to meet you."

His nose scrunched. "That's so weird, though."

She merely blinked at him.

"But I guess I can try it." He sighed, shaking his shoulders a bit before fixing her with a predatory look. "Hi, I'm Kai. Nice to meet you."

She winced. "Maybe a little less… carnivorous."

His stare flattened, bored. "Hi, I'm Kai, nice to meet you."

"Why don't you try smiling?"

His face lit up like a pinball machine. "Hi! I'm Kai! Nice to meet you!"

"Try dialing it down a notch?" He looked a little frustrated, lips pressing into a self-defeating line, and she felt herself slip into her doctor voice. "You're doing great, just try something between the last two."

He closed his eyes for a second, seemingly gathering his composure, and then suddenly opened them with, much to Bonnie's surprise, a relatively normal look. "Hi." He smiled a bit awkwardly. "I'm Kai. Nice to meet you."

Her face broke into a bright smile. "Perfect!"

His brows shot up. "Really?"

"Really."

"You think?"

"He's going to be all over you."

His eyes were glowing with glee and she couldn't help but slip into a chuckle—who knew Kai had an endearing side? Like, yeah, he was still holding a butcher knife an inch away from her face and probably wasn't kidding about blowing up Buzzfeed, but it was a nice surprise all the same.

The sound of glass bottles rattling cut through the room.

She glanced over and saw Damon straightening from the crate of champagne he'd set on the ground, stare fixed on them, and a flood of relief she'd vehemently deny surged through her. "You're back."

His eyes were keen, scrutinizing, panning between her and Kai's questionable position. "I am."

"Damon," Kai purred, flipping right back into creep-mode as he dropped his arms and gave the butcher knife a terrifying twirl.

"Hey, bud." He was approaching them with a strangely deliberate stride as she turned to face him.

"What'd you end up picking out?"

"A little Dom."

"Whoa, fanc—"

His hands slid up and pulled her face into a kiss before she could even finish the word, body backing her into the wall in a swift move. Her brows flew up, entirely blindsided, though sadly, predictably, it only took about three seconds for the rush of horny cat lady hormones to flood in.

The heat rose.

The world dimmed.

Her eyes fluttered shut, hands slipping down the wall as his mouth slid over hers, flusteringly deep. His fingers were warm around her neck, angling her chin up with a knuckled thumb, and just as she felt her hands slip off the wall to grip his shirt and ease him in, he pulled back with a nip of her bottom lip.

Her eyes flickered open in a haze.

"Sorry, that just…" his stare was dark, humming, glinting with a hint of self-satisfaction that instantly drew her right back into reality, "felt necessary." She pushed him back with a flushed scowl—opportunistic shithead. Like distantly, she knew she'd set herself up for that, but she thought he'd give her more than half a friggin' hour before using it against her. 'Necessary' her ass.

"So what's crackin', amigos?" he asked, veering around to face Kai and leaning back against the fridge. "What'd I miss?" He slung an arm around her shoulders and she immediately elbowed his side, drawing an amused wince.

"Bonnie was teaching me how to flirt," Kai mused, brows furrowed, staring at Damon with a kindling look, "but I feel like maybe I should've asked you instead. Cool move."

Damon smirked. "You like that?" He tipped his head toward Bonnie. "She liked it, too, she just won't admit it."

"She can speak for herself, and _no_ , she didn't," she said with a frosty smile, forcibly pleasant gaze trained on Kai. "Stick with what we came up with."

"Which is?"

Kai turned to face Damon directly and smiled like a robot. "Hi, I'm Kai. Nice to meet you."

Damon's lips twitched. "Wow." Bonnie rolled her eyes as he began shaking his head, making a show out of it. "Wow, truly, I'm just," he waved a hand before clasping it to his chest, "trying to take that all in."

Kai's eyes narrowed. "You don't like it."

"No, it's," he scoffed, "I mean, get out of here, it's a total slam dunk. Knockout line for sure. Bonnie definitely wins this one." He dropped a patronizing kiss on her head. "You hear that? You win, babe."

Honestly, he could go back to the murder cellar now.

A faint ring sounded through the room and Kai sniffed the air, ears pricking like a bloodhound's. "Flamingo tarts." He grabbed an apron and began tying it around himself as he hurried out of the kitchen. "Right on schedule."

Damon frowned. "Isn't your oven in here?"

"I have six," he called over his shoulder before disappearing out of the kitchen, leaving a puzzled and vaguely terrifying silence behind him—why the hell did he have six ovens? Where even _were_ they? How did he fit them all in here? What did he use them for? How big was this friggin' apartment?

Bonnie's spiraling thoughts hit a snag as Damon turned around to face her, shoulder propping against the fridge door. The corner of his mouth was pulled up into a half-smile and she was instantly annoyed at both how smug he looked and how good smug looked on him.

"What part of 'if the situation calls for it' confuses you?"

His stare took on a baffled glint. "He had you pinned to the fridge with a knife."

"And kissing me like some dumb alpha male fixes that how?"

"Reinforces the boyfriend boundary."

She scoffed. "As if you know anything about boyfriends or boundaries."

His mouth opened in counter before pausing thoughtfully. "True."

She rolled her eyes.

"Why are you so mad—he backed off, didn't he?"

"I'm not mad, I'm annoyed."

"Why?"

"Because that wasn't protecting me, that was taking advantage of a situation."

"Was it?" he ventured, pushing off the fridge and easing closer, and her shoulders slowly began to tense. "Want me to do it again?"

His hands caught her waist, body looming over hers in a wash of heat, slowly edging her right back into the paneling. She felt her stupid traitor lungs catch in her stupid traitor chest as he dropped his head down, breath warm on her lips, nose brushing a slow, skittering trail down hers.

"Take advantage, I mean."

Her eyes fell shut—fucking _hell_ , how did this keep happening?

She should've never said anything back in her room. She should've never kissed him. She should've never told him he was easy to resist—of _course_ he'd take that as a challenge, and of _course_ she'd lose. She literally couldn't imagine a time where didn't want to rip his clothes off. That's how deep this random attraction went—it was seeping into her memories and altering them.

"Is that a no?" he prompted after a beat, voice a rumble against her lips, and she felt herself drawing closer.

She tried to remember why she didn't do this.

She tried to remember her history.

She tried to remember Enzo.

But the air around her was too inescapably Damon.

"Mm-mm."

She felt his mouth curl against hers. "So it's a yes?" His hands slid over her hips, thumbs gliding down the jut of her hipbones, and she felt her head growing fuzzy with heat.

"Mm-mm."

He continued down the curve of her thighs before switching directions, slowly sliding up the hem of her dress. "Bonnie."

"Mm?"

One of his hands slipped beneath the fabric.

"Yes or no."

She didn't even know what they were talking about anymore, she just knew his hand was centimeters from her underwear and that was way too fucking far. "No," she mumbled arbitrarily, more out of stubbornness than anything, entirely fixated on the knuckles about to brush over exactly where she wanted them to.

"Okay."

And suddenly he was gone. Poof, bye, no more heat—just a cool as a cucumber dude waltzing back to the crate of champagne and swiping up a bottle. He grabbed a dishtowel and worked off the cork, easing back against the counter, and a flare of indignation shot through her. Her body was buzzing with dissatisfaction, the throb between her thighs longing for his fingers, for friction, for the—

She shook her head sharply to clear it.

 _No._

Jesus, she needed to get a grip. They were in Kai's apartment, like what was he going to do, finger her against the kitchen wall while Kai cluelessly fussed over his flamingo tarts in the next room? She exhaled slowly, trying to ignore the buried, messy part of her that was turned on by the idea, that hummed from the risk of it all.

She didn't do that kind of thing.

Not anymore.

Thus, with a sharp sigh and a stubborn tilt of her chin, she yanked her dress down and set off toward the living room. "Hey, Kai?" she called out, snatching the bottle from Damon mid-swig and launching him into a minor coughing fit. A splash of champagne spilled onto his collar. "Need any help with those tarts?"

"This is a five hundred dollar shirt," he managed after a few seconds, voice scratchy from choking, and she snorted as she took a swig and swept through the doorway.

"Not anymore, it isn't."

* * *

It wasn't that Caroline cared about the cat.

'Cause really, she didn't.

She realized it might seem like she did, given that she'd just spent the past hour holed up in her room, reading about tabbies on the internet, but honestly, it had nothing to do with the cat. It was just who she was. She couldn't have some foreign thing living under her roof and _not_ research it.

So when she wandered into the kitchen for water and saw Stefan crouched on the floor, feeding the cat chunk light tuna, her response wasn't so much a statement of concern as a statement of fact. "Solid white albacore is easier for them to digest."

He glanced up with a surprised look, clearly not having seen her come in. "Hey."

Her lips ticked up briefly. "Hi."

He stared at her for a second before dropping his gaze to the empty tuna can and picking it up. "This is the only kind you have in your pantry."

"Oh."

"But that's good to know."

She shrugged, feeling a little awkward for some reason. "Thank Google."

His stare lifted back up to hers, narrowed, a little curious, and she ignored it and walked over to the cupboard for a glass. She could feel him watching her as she filled it with water.

She knew what he was thinking.

She'd Googled the cat.

She must be warming up to it.

The thought instinctively annoyed her—she was just doing her due diligence. Like what was she supposed to do, let a wild animal roam around her apartment and not know a single thing about it? Please. She was Caroline Forbes. She was nothing if not prepared.

She made to turn around and head back to her room when her eye caught on the carton of milk on the counter. She glanced down at the small saucer on the floor. "You gave it milk?"

"Her," he corrected, and her stare lifted back up to his. "Officially a girl. And yeah, I did." She pursed her lips, and he arched an amused brow. "Is that okay?"

"It's just that most tabbies can't metabolize lactose," she explained, waving her glass, "so if you have to give it something, cream's a better option."

The glitter in his eye was putting her on edge. "Duly noted. I mean, I don't exactly have a wealth of options here, but—"

"No, right, obviously," she said, clearing her throat, "I just… thought you might want to know."

"Thanks."

"Mm-hmm."

She lingered there for a second, unsure of what to do, and he lifted a brow. "Do you want to pet her?"

She glanced down at the cat with a wary look—she was happily lapping tuna off a plate. "I'm good."

"You sure? She's super cuddly."

As if on cue, the cat straightened up and shot her a curious look, tongue flashing over her teeth. Caroline instinctively stiffened. "All set."

He nodded, leaning back against the counter, but there was still a distinct air of amusement about him, a glimmer of 'sooner or later you're coming around'. She expected it to annoy her, but instead, it just made her feel weird. Off-kilter.

She struggled to smother the feeling. "I'm gonna go—" she gestured toward her room with the glass, and he nodded.

"I'll keep her out of trouble."

"Great, thanks."

He smiled and it made her pulse jump, so she made a hasty exit and headed back over to her room. The air instantly felt more breathable as she closed the door behind her, and for a second, she merely leaned against her door, trying to make sense of her crazy ass head.

She needed to get it together.

Seriously.

Not only for her own sake, but for his, too, because this wasn't benefitting anyone. Her eyes fluttered closed as she thought about the way she'd freaked out at him earlier, at the genuine fear in his eyes. He'd looked horrified.

She inhaled deeply through her nose, guilt warming her blood—she still couldn't believe she'd done that. Especially now that she'd finally had enough distance to think about it clearly and could see it for just how over the top it was. It was just… she didn't really… do well.

With intimacy.

Like at all.

Sex was fine, but intimacy just…

She pressed her lips together, fingers curling into loose fists at her sides—she couldn't stomach it. Not for years. Not since Matt. And she was aware that didn't make much sense, that given the kind of things Matt had put her through, she should probably hate roughness and crave softness, but for some reason, the physicality of it all wasn't what messed her up. The bad parts weren't what kept her up at night, what sent her into a blind panic when she least expected it.

It was her willingness to stay with him throughout it all.

It was how addicted she'd been to the soft parts, to the lovely parts, to the point where she could lie to herself about the rest.

Intimacy got her there.

Intimacy trapped her there.

It made her unable to trust herself, and she never, ever wanted to feel that way ever again, because at the end of the day, when everything else was stripped away, her instincts were all she had. She was all she had. She needed to be able to rely on herself. Intimacy messed with her ability to do that, and that's why the barest trace of it made her stomach clench into knots.

Usually, though, she could avoid it pretty easily. Usually, she just felt a vague wave of nausea and kicked whoever was eliciting it to curb. With Stefan, though, she just… she sighed, pushing herself off the door and walking over to her desk. She didn't know. Her usual instincts weren't kicking in, or at least not fast enough. Her reactions were overblown. Her emotions were zigzagging.

It was weird, and it was unfair, and she needed to reign it in, if not for selfless reasons then for selfish ones—the more normal she acted, the less likely he'd be to keep pressing her for an explanation.

Normal was the way to go.

Nice was the way forward.

Her stare softened a bit as she dropped into her chair—plus, he honestly just deserved a little normalcy from her for once.

A sudden movement drew her gaze, and she jolted at the sight of the cat carelessly wandering into her room. "What the—" she glanced up at the door she knew for a fact she'd closed and sure enough, it was half-ajar now. Her eyes grew baffled. "How the hell do you keep breaking and entering!? _"_

The cat merely sidled up to her desk and sat by her feet, tail flicking around primly. Caroline sighed. "Guess you really were Kai's cat."

The cat stared up at her desk, stare taking on a curious gleam, and Caroline stiffened. "Oh, no. No, no, _no_ , none of the jumpi—" a yelp sliced through her words as she leapt right onto her desk, sending a few pages skittering to the floor. Caroline scoffed, waving a harassed hand. "Sure, knock everything over—just a quarter million dollar ad campaign, no big deal."

The cat ignored her, taking a few sauntering steps forward and sniffing the jar that held all her pens. She lifted a paw to swipe at it, and after a few jabs, successfully managed to knock it over. Caroline blinked at her.

She blinked back, lazy and almost animatronic looking.

"Do you want to get thrown out in the snow?"

The cat eased into a sitting position.

"Because I have no issue throwing you out in the snow."

Her tail began flicking around whimsically.

"In fact, I have no issue throwing you out my second story window."

She yawned, indulgent and luxuriating, and Caroline almost had to appreciate the snobbery of the gesture. This cat well and truly didn't give a shit. After a few seconds, her eyes started to grow sleepy, and Caroline's lips gave the faintest of twitches.

Okay. So she might be a little cute.

She tentatively lifted her hand up to offer it and the cat immediately surged against it. Caroline stiffened at first, caught off-guard by the sudden move, though after a few seconds of vigorous rubbing, it became clear she was just a super aggressive cuddler.

Caroline's arched an amused brow. "Not so sleepy anymore, are you?"

The cat dove underneath her hand to rub her ears against it.

"Pick up my damn pens."

She twisted her neck to rub her jaw against her nails.

"If you can open doors, you can pick up pens."

She completely ignored her, getting to her feet and gliding the rest of her lithe frame beneath her palm, and Caroline sighed, dropping her chin into her free hand.

"You're lucky Stefan's here."

She started purring at the name, and Caroline's lips flickered at the response. Of course. Even the cat wasn't immune to Stefan. "Trust me," she said as she scratched her between her ears, voice softening, a little exasperated, "I know."

And she did know.

God, she knew.

She knew the way he smelled like books and clean linens and fresh coffee.

She knew the warmth and texture of his hands.

She knew how his fingers felt in her hair, how they'd tried to grip it impersonally, carelessly, but ended up holding it like it was made of gold anyway.

She knew how he felt inside her, how he moved—heated, hungry, but never quite fully out of control. Never without one foot on the ledge. Never without a fingertip on the pulse of reality, checking in, taking readings.

She knew what it felt like to come with him, shaking, rumbling, his breath fluttering against her lips as their orgasms built.

She'd felt so much in that moment. So, so much. In retrospect, without the panic blaring in her ears, she realized that. It was so much more than just disorientation. So much more than just fear.

Every single nerve ending in her body had been awake. Focused. Firing. The brave ones. The scared ones. The hidden ones. The ones she hid behind. They were all there, vibrating in his hands, telescoped onto him, and she'd felt parts of herself she hadn't felt in years. Saw bits of herself she hadn't known survived. And it was terrifying, because for that brief glitter of a moment, for better or for worse, she'd been Caroline Forbes in all her complete, defenseless, messy glory.

At the time, it'd felt like seeing a ghost.

She realized now, though, that that wasn't quite right. Ghost was too cynical.

It'd felt like seeing an old friend.

A light knock on the door drew her out of her thoughts, and she glanced over to the sight of Stefan leaning against her doorway. His arms were crossed, stare bright and a little surprised, and for a horrifying second, she thought she might've been thinking out loud. And then he nodded at her desk.

"New friend?"

She followed his gaze and realized she was still petting the cat. She dropped her hand with a sharp breath—oh, thank God. "Uh, no, this cat just…" she cleared her throat, "has a weird knack for getting through closed doors."

"And closed hearts, apparently."

She shot him a dry look, and his mouth tugged up at a corner, lopsiding the curve of lips. Her skin warmed a bit—why did he always have to do things like that? Like honestly, who was more of a headache, him or this cat?

"So, I threw together some actual human food," he said after a bit, eying her in question. "You hungry at all?"

"I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"I…" she realized she actually was pretty hungry, and she wasn't sure how much non-cooking food they had left at this point. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. "I mean, what did you make?"

His smile widened, and her pulse did a weird little jump that annoyed the living hell out of her. "Come find out."

* * *

"…so then I was like, 'it doesn't vaporize your organs, it liquefies them, hello'—like how did this guy pass kindergarten without learning basic thermo?—but they ended up ruling it unconstitutional either way, so," Kai waved a hand, taking a long slurp from his fifth Shirley Temple, "that's why I have this liquefaction ray prototype."

Damon eyed the handgun-like weapon he was flapping around with a wary look, brows arched over his eyes. The three of them were gathered around his 'smoking room' for 'cocktails and aperitifs', which roughly translated into tray upon tray of fancy appetizers being served in yet another room that defied the physical dimensions of his apartment, and so far, Damon approximated they'd been in mortal danger at least seventy-three times.

This was the seventy-fourth.

"So that thing can melt my organs."

"Yep," Kai chirped, giving it a fond look. "I call it The Liquidier. You know, 'cause it—"

"—liquefies you and you die."

"Exactly!"

"Fun," Damon said. "And it's fully functional?"

"Totally. Like if I press this button right now—" he suddenly aimed the gun at Bonnie's back as she browsed the appetizer table and Damon lurched out of his seat, "—she's a human puddle."

"Yeah, let's not do that," he said, batting it down with a tight smile. He shot a sharp look at Bonnie—she was too busy popping fried goat cheese puffs in her mouth to notice anything—and he once again wondered how the hell she'd ever planned on coming here alone.

A sudden beeping sound rang through the air, likely coming from one of the million ovens, and Kai lit up like a firework. "Swan's done!" He hopped to his feet and brushed the crumbs off his Ugly Christmas Sweater and skinny jeans combo. "I can't _wait_ to see how this turned out—I've never broiled it before."

Damon feigned remorse. "Too bad I'm allergic."

"I mean, I have a suitcase full of Epi-pens if you want to sneak a bite."

Why the hell did he have a suitcase full of—you know what? Didn't matter. "Eh, it's a pretty severe allergy," he replied. "Best not to risk it."

Kai shrugged. "Your loss. More for us—right, Bon?"

She glanced over with a blank look, swallowing the giant lump of puff pastry in her mouth. "What?"

"Never mind, it'll be a surprise—be right back!"

He traipsed out of the room like an eager little ballerino, skipping every other step, and Bonnie watched him for a puzzled beat before reverting her attention back to the appetizers.

"You do realize you were almost liquefied a second ago, right?"

She kept browsing the table. "I'm not talking to you."

"Why, 'cause I didn't feel you up in the kitchen?"

Her shoulders stiffened. " _No_ , because I explicitly told you to stop using this situation as an excuse to be a wannabe seductive shithead, and your response was to offer to feel me up in the kitchen."

"And you said no."

"I know."

"So I didn't."

"I know."

"So what's the problem?"

"You ego's the problem."

"What does that—"

"I don't negotiate with terrorists."

His lips twitched as she plucked something pink and puffy off a tray, giving it a tentative sniff before popping it into her mouth. Her eyes immediately rolled back into her head. "Oh, my God," she said through a muffled mouthful. Her gaze flew over to his. "This is amazing. You have to try this."

"I thought you weren't talking to me."

"It's like… chicken-y, almost?" she mused, seemingly too caught up in her foodgasm to care about her own rules. "But it's not chicken. I thought it'd be crab or ham because of the color, but it must be some kind of weird pink poultry because it definitely—"

She froze suddenly. Her stare slid down to the tart in her hand. The color drained from her face.

"Damon."

He frowned at her. "What?"

"I think I just ate a flamingo tart."

Her stare lifted up to his, bright with horror, and he started laughing at how cartoonish it was.

"It's not funny," she snapped, distressed. "Is eating flamingo even legal? Did I just commit a crime?"

His face suddenly drew into an expression of mock-horror. "Oh, my God."

"What?"

He flattened a hand against his heart. "I just realized."

" _What_?"

"Stefan's not even going to be able to look at yo—" he burst into another laugh as she threw the tart at him, though he caught her lips twitching.

"You're a jerk."

"Seriously, he's probably going to take you to court."

"Shut up."

"Try you for flamingo hate crimes."

"I'm ignoring you again."

He opened his mouth to respond but before he could, a stiff, gray-faced Kai strode back into the room and came to a dramatic halt in the center. He drew in a deep breath, shoulders rising all the way up to his ears.

"There's a problem with the swan."

Damon's brows lifted. "Yeah?"

Kai nodded jerkily. An awkward beat of silence passed where he offered no further explanation, and Damon blinked.

"Did it turn into a princess?"

"I burnt it," he spat out, blunt, horrified, like he was admitting to first-degree murder (or rather, like he was someone else admitting to first-degree murder). Damon shot Bonnie a bemused look.

"Uh, that's okay!" she said, trying to sound encouraging. "I mean, I know you were really looking forward to it, so that part sucks, but honestly, there's already so much amazing food here."

"Yeah, Bonnie really likes the flamingo tarts," Damon added, and she shot him a dark look that he met with a smile.

"There's really more than enough to go around," she pressed on, switching her gaze back to Kai's rigid frame. "Like we could probably live off these appetizers alone for a month. Plus, don't forget about Jesús Crisco!"

Damon's brows flew up. "Jesús _what_?"

"Crucified chicken."

"Course."

"I need to find another one," Kai muttered, more to himself than them, and Bonnie frowned.

"What?"

"I need to find another swan."

"Uh," she shot Damon a puzzled look, "like… outside, or—"

"I'll be right back," he announced suddenly, offering them a skittish smile. "Make yourselves at home, play some Parcheesi—I've just got to step our for a second."

Before they could say anything, he hightailed it out of the room like a man on a mission. They heard some muffled bangs, the sound of a crossbow being loaded, a few weird yowls that might've been practice mating calls, and finally, the swing of the front door flying shut, leaving the two of them alone in his apartment.

Damon glanced at Bonnie—she was staring out the door with a baffled look. After a few seconds, she met his gaze. "What just happened?"

"Pretty sure he just went swan hunting."

"There's a giant blizzard outside."

"Doesn't seem to be a problem for him."

"It's nighttime."

"Also doesn't seem to be a problem for him."

"Is that even safe?"

He snorted. "Honestly, if I had to take bets on nature's fury vs. Kaleidoscope, I'd choose Kaleidoscope."

She glanced back at the door, concern tightening her features, and for a second, he couldn't help but marvel at the fact that she was actually worried about the safety of a guy who invented a gun that liquefied organs. As if she could even protect him. Like what was she going to do, trek out after him in all her five-foot-zero glory?

His lips twitched—he wouldn't put it past her.

"I'm sure he'll be fine."

She chewed her lip.

"Bonnie."

She glanced back at him.

"He builds nukes for fun."

She considered the point for a beat before scrunching her nose. "Yeah, he'll be fine."

He waved a hand in a 'there ya go' gesture.

"What are we supposed to do here while he hunts down a swan, though? How long does that even take?"

He shrugged. "We can go back to your apartment."

She groaned. "I'm so tired of being there."

"We can…" he cast his gaze around before landing on the Liquidier, "melt Jesús Crisco's skin off."

She sighed as she began taking loose, loping steps around the room, her bare feet making her look whimsically young. "I think he's been through enough."

"We can go on a scavenger hunt to find all six of his ovens."

" _Or_ ," she said, turning around on one foot and hitting him with a sudden devious look, "we could do something we'll probably never get the chance to do here again."

Her eyes glittered and his brows ticked up.

"Something we could only ever do as loudly and shamelessly as we want to while he's not here…"

He was fairly certain he knew where this was going.

"Something that will _definitely_ keep us entertained for hours."

He held her gaze for a beat, fixed and humming. And then: "You want to snoop."

" _Totally_!"

"Let's do it."

" _Yeeeesss_."

And for the next half hour or so, that's exactly what they did. They started with his bedroom, which actually seemed disappointingly normal until Damon fell through a trapdoor and ended up in another apartment. The bathroom had a shower that doubled as an anti-gravity chamber, which Bonnie thought was really cool until she literally didn't have enough mass to push herself across the room and turn it off. There was a medieval suit of armor in the hallway that was actually an AI android—Damon found out the hard way when he playfully went 'en garde!' and ended up shoved against the wall with a sword to his throat.

But all the best stuff, unsurprisingly, was behind a door that had a bright red Hazmat sign tacked to it. Three dimensional holograms. Shrink ray prototypes. Brains in jars, which Bonnie couldn't definitively rule out as human (a fact the dissection-happy doctor in her seemed _way_ too okay with, in Damon's opinion). There was a mini-particle accelerator wrapped around the ceiling, and when he pressed a random button, a gaseous ball of matter big-banged in the center of the room.

He glanced at Bonnie. "Did I just create a planet?"

There was also a fully functioning light saber that Bonnie thought was just a toy until she nearly beheaded Damon with it.

"You don't think he'll notice, right?" she asked, wincing at the lamp she'd sliced in half instead.

"I mean, I'm pretty sure he's a spy, but sure," he said, rubbing his neck with a harassed look.

The near death experiences continued rolling in as the exploration persisted—laser goggles almost burned off Bonnie's leg, Damon cryogenically froze his thumb for a bit, and a mini-black hole opened up at one point—until against all odds, they worked their way down to the wine cellar with all of their limbs still in tact.

"How much you want to bet one of these opens up a hidden passageway?" Damon called out as he skimmed a hand over a row of wine bottles, squinting to read the names. Bonnie was searching the place for a light switch, but the moonlight filtering in from the transom window was just enough to make out the labels. Upon spotting a familiar-looking one, his hand stilled. He plucked it up by the bottleneck and brought it up to his eyes, lips flickering in confirmation—1985 Cheval Blanc. "This is the bottle my boss gave me when she hired me," he said to no one in particular, stare grazing over the label.

He remembered how desperate he'd been for that job, how much schmoozing and ass-kissing he'd had to go through just to get an interview. He was a community college kid competing with Wharton and Harvard Business School grads. He'd killed that $750 bottle with four dollars in his wallet.

"You still work there?"

He glanced up—Bonnie was watching him with a curious look. He felt a flicker of dread. He knew that look. The prying look. "Yep," he said, sliding the bottle back onto the shelf and resuming his browsing. "Loyal employee."

"And you said you work in venture something?"

"Capital," he supplied, pulling out a vintage Bordeaux and giving it an appreciative once-over. Karate's taste wasn't half bad.

"And is that what you always wanted to do?" His eyes lit with a glint of annoyance at the question—there it was. "Like growing up, I mean."

"I wanted to do whatever made me enough money to never have to rely on anybody else for it, so," he shot her a brief smile, sliding the bottle back into its slot, "yeah."

Her stare was a keen, speculative green even from across the dark room, and he could tell things were about to take an annoying turn. Luckily, he found a temporary distraction in the form of a light switch.

"Look at that—found it."

And no sooner had he flicked it on that the lights sputtered, a zapping sound filled the air, and the room plunged into complete darkness. Like _darkness_ darkness. Like darker than it'd been before. He blinked for a second.

"Really?"

He glanced out the transom and saw that the streetlights had gone out, too. The whole block was shorted.

"I made a black hole twenty minutes ago and _this_ is what knocks out the power?"

"We need to go to the basement," he heard Bonnie sigh, her frame a dim silhouette in the inky air. "Like the main one. That's where all the circuit breakers are."

He snorted. "And how are we supposed to get there?"

"Uh, walking?"

"This door unlocks with a code, remember?"

She scoffed. "And we know the code, remember?"

"And the code runs on electricity, remember?"

She fell silent, the reality of their situation slowly dawning on her, and he watched her shadowed frame for a second before reaching over and grabbing the Bordeaux.

"Fuck," she said after a beat.

"Fuck, indeed," he agreed, tearing the seal off with his teeth.

* * *

"And this is—"

"Ketchup, mayo, garlic, salt."

Caroline pulled a face and Stefan rolled his eyes.

"Try it."

She dipped a potato wedge into the sauce and, after a reluctant look, popped it into her mouth. Her face slowly loosened with surprise, eyes flicking up to meet his in the warm candlelight.

"See?"

She kept chewing, clearly baffled with the fact that she liked it, and he couldn't help the uptick of his mouth—he didn't feel like he won their silent little battles often, but he knew he had the upper hand with food. He'd grown up with Rebekah the Human Grimace. He could navigate picky eaters like a pro.

And he was—Caroline had yet to dislike anything he'd made her try over the past half hour—but that didn't stop her from being skeptical of every new thing he put in front of her. It was honestly impressive. He wasn't sure he'd ever met anyone less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt.

"Where'd you learn to make this?" she asked in exactly the same way she'd asked about the past five foods—curious, a little awed, and with a small undercurrent of accusation, like how dare he have the gall to keep making things she liked.

"College," he said, spearing a wedge onto his fork and dipping it. "I was up late and starving and everything was closed, so I looked up what I could make with the three things I had in my fridge."

"I don't even like ketchup and mayo separately," she insisted, stare fixed on his, almost as if demanding an explanation, and he chuckled.

"I don't know what you want me to say."

Her lips flickered with humor. "I don't either."

"You seem annoyed."

"I feel annoyed."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

He snorted. "Okay."

"I'm trying not to be because I don't really have a reason."

"Right."

"But it's not working."

"Old habits die hard."

"Why is this so good?" she demanded in an exasperated burst, and he laughed as the cat lifted her sleepy head from the armchair in affront. "Why were those cauliflower nuggets so good? Why is everything you do just so—" she waved a flustered a hand before sighing sharply, pressing her lips together to keep from saying more.

His brows lifted—that sounded like it was verging on a compliment. "So what?"

"Nothing."

"So great?"

"Forget it."

"Is that what you were going to say?"

"No."

"That I'm so perfect it bothers you?"

"Oh, my God," she laughed, shoving a potato wedge into her mouth, and he shrugged.

"It's okay, I get it, I'm a lot to take in."

She shook her head as he leaned back onto his hands, lips tugging into a grin. They were sprawled on the living room floor in their pajamas, the room shadowed from the blackout, lit only by the flickering glow of a dozen or so mismatched candles. The air was warm and golden around them. The coffee table was covered in a colorful array dishes. The space heater was whirring quietly beside them. The cat was curled into a cozy little ball on the armchair, sleeping. And somehow, despite the night's rocky start, things were finally starting to feel somewhat comfortable again between them.

Or at least, as comfortable as things ever really got.

He still had a million questions about what had gone down before, but he'd pretty much come to terms with the fact that he wasn't getting any answers anytime soon. She didn't want to talk about it. He wasn't going to force her. Pushing the subject made her anxious and tense, and he didn't like that more than he didn't like not knowing.

He could handle a little ambiguity.

For now, anyway.

"I'm going to have to go on such a health kick after this week," she muttered as she dipped another potato wedge, and he sighed.

"I hear you." He'd been trying to keep things as healthy as he could, but they were pretty much getting down to the scraps now, ingredients-wise. He'd probably had more meat and junk food in the past week than he usually had in a month. "Full disclosure, though, I have hot chocolate waiting for dessert."

She snorted. "Six AM pilates, here I come."

He winced. "Yikes."

"It's not that bad," she said. "I did a two-hour morning spin class once and ever since then, I have a whole new bar for horrible."

"Okay, what exactly is spinning?" he said, pushing himself up a bit with genuine conviction. "'Cause Lexi talks about it all the time and I always picture a bunch of fit people in overpriced exercise clothes spinning around in circles."

She snorted. "I mean, you got the first half right."

"What do you do?"

"It's like indoor cycling."

His eyes thinned in confusion. "So you're just on a bike?"

"Yeah."

"Then why don't they call it biking? Like what part is spinning? Is it like the wheel?" She began laughing at how much he was overthinking it and he sighed. "I don't understand gyms."

"So what do you do?" He glanced at her and she arched a brow. "I mean, I refuse to believe that all that," she waved a hand at his general frame and he felt a hum of flattery at the implication, "is from marathon study sessions."

"Uh, swimming, mostly," he said, trying to cast off the dumb urge to smile. "I mean, it changes around a lot—I run and bike, too, but lately, I've been indoor swimming more than anything else. I like the zone I get in underwater. Plus, it's just too cold outside for running."

"Not a treadmill guy?"

He grimaced. "Can't do it. I need the fresh air and the pull of getting somewhere new. A treadmill's just," he shook his head, "too utilitarian."

"Ugh, you're like Bonnie," she said, pulling a face. "She dances because she loves it and just _happens_ to get the added bonus of staying fit."

"Okay, I eat pretty healthy, though—Bonnie's like a biological wonder of the world."

" _Right_?"

"I genuinely don't know how she doesn't weigh 500 pounds."

"She eats waffles as a bedtime snack, Stefan."

"I know."

"Every night."

"Yeah."

"With whipped cream and chocolate sauce and syrup and sprinkles."

"Yep."

"Like after she already had dinner and dessert an hour ago."

"That's her."

"That's more sugar than I eat in a whole week."

"She should probably be in a coma."

"She must burn like two thousand calories a day to stay the size she is."

"I mean, have you seen her dance?" he asked, chuckle slipping into his voice. "She flips into military mode."

"True," she snorted. "We got kicked out of a club once because she got _way_ too into a dance battle and started taking up the whole dance floor, and when the bouncer came to break it up she tried to fight him."

He laughed. "I'm guessing tequila was involved?"

"Totally."

He shook his head. "She tried to teach me the Electric Slide at my sister's wedding last year and she got so mad that she stopped talking to me for an hour."

Caroline chuckled, though after a second, her brow furrowed. "Wait, you didn't know the Electric Slide until last year?"

He scoffed. "I still don't know it." At her bewildered look, he shrugged. "I don't dance."

"Stefan."

"What?"

"It's the _Electric Slide._ "

"I told you, I don't dance."

"It isn't a dance, it's a rite of passage."

"Pretty sure it's a dance."

"You have to know the Electric Slide—it's like required elementary school learning. Times tables, spelling, and the Electric Slide."

He lifted his hands in a what-can-you-do gesture.

"You can't be American and not know the Electric Slide."

"I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world."

She grimaced at the hipster-ness of the statement and his lips twitched—he thought she might like that.

After a few seconds, though, she set her fork down and sighed. "Get up."

His brow furrowed as she pushed herself onto her feet. "What?"

"Up," she demanded, brushing her pajama pants off and walking toward him. He blinked.

"I'm not learning the Electric Slide right now."

"Yes, you are."

"Caroline—"

"I can't calmly have dinner with someone who thinks they're too cool for the Electric Slide."

"I don't think I'm too cool, I ju—" he lapsed into a laugh as she grabbed his hand and pulled him up, clearly not taking no for an answer. "Okay, okay."

He pushed himself onto his feet with a sigh, unable to believe he was doing this. He really wasn't kidding about his dancing aversion. Bonnie had spent their entire grade school career trying to get him to dance at parties and it failed every time. Hell, even Elena had put in a massive effort—signed them up for a couple's class and everything—and it just never took.

"Do you know any part of it?" she asked as she pulled him a few feet away from the table, giving them more space to move. She turned to face him with an expectant look, a little over a foot away.

"I know there's a weird kick at some point."

She rolled her eyes at the jab. Their bodies were shrouded in shadow, the air colder now that they weren't right next to the space heater, and he felt the comfort of the room shifting a bit, the warm glow drifting into something cooler. Darker. He found himself growing very aware of the heat of her.

"Okay," she said, gathering her hair into a loose bun, and he suddenly couldn't help but think about the way it'd felt tangled in his fist, "the first two steps are literally inverses of each other, so it's really easy."

"I'm sure I'll find a way to mess it up."

She snorted as she secured an elastic around her hair. "Well, I promise I won't get irrationally mad and not talk to you for an hour."

"You mean any more than usual?"

She shot him a 'ha ha' look, but he caught the glitter of humor in her eyes as she began walking to the right, her movements rhythmic and fluid. "This is part one. Three steps to the right, easy peasy, and then clap." She clapped her hands together for emphasis.

He blinked at her. "Cool."

"Try it."

He took three lifeless steps to the side and gave a dull clap.

She snorted. "Stefan."

"I did what you said."

"Would it kill you to put a little effort?"

"Maybe."

"The song literally says 'you've got to feel it'."

"Well, I guess I'm disqualified."

She pursed her lips. "Go the other way now."

He sighed and took three dragging steps to the left.

"No, you have to cross the second leg behind the first one."

"What?"

"Like this." She began stepping to the side, and he squinted at her feet, trying to discern what she did differently.

"I don't see anything special."

"I'm grapevining my steps."

"Grape-whating?"

"Just—" she exhaled lowly and walked over to him, and immediately, he felt his awareness flip into a different setting at her proximity. "Okay," she said, staring down at his feet, and a strand came loose from her bun, "step to the side."

He took a step to the side.

"Keep going."

He took another one and she flattened a hand against his chest, stopping him. "No, see how your second foot ended up next to your first one?" She glanced up at him and he tried to ignore the heat of her palm.

"Sure."

"It's supposed to land behind it."

"How do I do that?"

Her lips twitched. "By stepping behind it."

He wanted to brush the curl off her face.

"Try it."

He took an absent step to the side, fixated on the shadowed curl, on the way it reminded him of the hair that'd fallen into her face when she was moving on top of him, and he suddenly felt the brush of her foot against his ankle.

A shot of adrenaline flared up his body.

His stare slid back into focus—she was frowning at their feet.

"See how I'm moving it behind your first leg?" She slowly pushed it back behind his other foot.

"Yeah."

"That's grapevining."

He never thought something called grapevining would make his pulse erratic.

After a beat of silence, she glanced up, and the effect she was having on him must've been obvious because her face changed a bit. Loosened.

The air took on a hum around them.

He could feel the flutter of his heart against her palm.

For a long, charged moment, he thought he was going to kiss her.

He was pretty sure she wanted him to.

He almost did.

Instead, against pretty much everything his body was telling him to do, his eyes fell shut. "I can't do this." Silence rang around them, amplifying what he was sure was surprise and confusion on her end, and he merely shook his head. "I'm sorry, I just—" he took a step back, putting a little distance between them, and he cursed himself for his timing, for choosing this as the moment where reality caught up with him, for once again tricking himself into believing he was something he wasn't.

He couldn't just cast aside what happened earlier.

He wasn't cool with just acting like it never happened.

He couldn't ignore that things were so unstable between them, that he never knew how something was going to turn out, that he never knew what they were doing.

He couldn't handle the ambiguity.

Maybe before Elena, it would've been a different story, but after having had the rug swept out from under him so violently, he couldn't handle being blindsided by things. He needed to know exactly what was happening.

"I know you don't want to talk about earlier," he said, voice tense, stare fixed to the ground, and she cleared her throat.

"Stefan—"

"And I know you probably think I'm overthinking things or giving them too much importance or whatever," he pressed on, needing to get this out there, "but a second ago, I was about to kiss you, and I realized I had no idea if that was even allowed to 'cause the last time I did, I mean," he scoffed, stare shooting up to hers.

She dropped her gaze to hers hands.

"I have no idea what we're doing, Caroline." He gave a small, hoarse laugh. "I have no idea where we stand, where you stand, where I'm supposed to stand—and I know you wrote me a whole contract covering that in frankly frightening detail, and you're probably wondering what else you have to do to spell things out for me, but for better or for worse, I'm lost." He waved a desperate hand. "I'm totally lost. And I thought I could be cool with that, I know you expect me to be cool with that, but—"

"I don't."

He dropped his hand, words catching on his tongue at the interjection. Her voice was quiet but confident, stare fixed downward.

"What?"

Her gaze lifted back up to his, and to his surprise, her lips flickered guiltily. "I don't expect you to be cool with it. "

He merely blinked at her, unsure how to interpret that, and after a few uncertain seconds, she sighed.

"We should sit."

* * *

Damon didn't particularly like being locked up in cold, dark places.

Tied up to a bed? Sure. Handcuffed to a shower? Bring it. Blindfolded on a chair? Always a good time. But dank cellars were _really_ not his thing, and they hadn't been since he'd been placed in a particularly fuzzy foster family when he was twelve. Big fans of timeout, big fans of their pitch-black basement, and big fans of ignoring their raging rat infestation.

He wouldn't call it trauma or anything—largely because he wouldn't give those pricks the satisfaction—but it did make him tense up a bit in Kai's shadowed wine cellar. Tightened the easy line of his shoulders. Tacked a hyperawareness onto his senses. It was easy to ignore and even easier to shroud in humor, so ever a lover of ease, he did both.

"You know, if you wanted to get me alone in a dark, secluded place, all you had to do was ask."

Bonnie ignored him, crouched in front of the back door with a bobby pin poking out of her mouth, fruitlessly jimmying another one in the keyhole.

"And I mean, a closet would've done just fine. Poetic, really, given our history."

Her jaw clenched a bit, stare still stubbornly focused.

"Unless the plan was to get me drunk on all this wine and take advantage of me, in which case," he shrugged plainly, "entirely unnecessary effort. Especially in that dress."

She dropped her head back with a sharp sigh. "Imagine a world where you were actually helpful. Can you? Because I can't."

"Didn't you start the day literally tripping over yourself to thank me for being so helpful last night?"

She fell begrudgingly silent, swinging her stare back down to the lock and resuming her tinkering.

"Although, maybe the tripping was part of the whole acting-awkward-because-you-really-want-to-screw-me thing. Hard to tell."

"What the hell do you want, an award?" She turned a baffled gaze onto him, voice a little muffled around the bobby pin in her mouth. "I'm attracted to you, congrats, I've joined the ranks of what I'm sure are tons of other people, consider this your formal notice." She waved a hand around in sarcastic fanfare. "Can you get over yourself and help me now?"

He snorted. "Help you pick a chain key lock with a bobby pin?"

Her eyes thinned. "What the hell is a chain key lock?"

"A lock even Houdini couldn't pick with a bobby pin."

She blinked at him, silent for a beat. "I've been trying to pick this lock for five minutes."

"I know, it's adorable."

She spat the bobby pin from her mouth, lifting her hands up in surrender. "I'm done."

"Aw, but the nose scrunch was so cute."

"You want to die in here, let's die in here," she pressed, pushing herself back up to her feet.

"Come on, it's not so ba—"

A sudden rattling sound echoed through the room and his shoulders instinctively tensed, a flash of memories cutting through his head—skittering claws on his skin, the creak of retreating footsteps, a darkness so thick he couldn't even see his own hands. He blinked rapidly to clear it.

Bonnie was staring at him with a harassed look. "You were saying?"

His shoulders lifted in a stiff shrug. "Just some old pipes—adds to the ambience."

"Yeah, the ambience of getting murdered."

"You have a serious fixation on getting murdered."

She scoffed. "It's almost like I'm trapped in my creepy neighbor's wine cellar with a guy I barely know who has multiple identities."

His jaw ticced, not expecting her to circle back to the wallet thing.

She arched a brow at his silence, folding her arms across her chest. "Oh, sorry, was I supposed to have just forgotten about that in the face of your magical, mind-numbing sex appeal?"

He pushed himself off the wall and slowly sidled up to her, taking advantage of the out. "I don't know." His hands slid onto her hips, lips curling as he pulled her stiff frame into him. "You tell me."

Her lips flickered mirthlessly. "Brain's still in tact."

His hands began roaming. "I think you're wrong."

"And you know, now that you've made it super clear that our no sex talk truce is out the window, I can pry all I want."

"I think you feel everything getting hazy."

"Why do you have two IDs?"

"Vision's starting to fuzz up."

"Are there just two or do you have more?"

"Words are starting to blur."

"Who's Damon Fell?"

He dropped his hands in sharp reaction to the name, tight sigh leaving his mouth. He couldn't help it, he just… _fuck_ , he hated the sound of it, how familiar it still felt after all these years. Her kindling curiosity was palpable, thrumming in the air between them, and after a few seconds, he pushed a hand through his hair, voice curt. "It's just an old name."

Her brows slid upward. "An old name?"

"Yeah, I changed it."

"So then why do you have a recent ID with it on there?"

His stare grew harassed. "Because sometimes I still need it."

"Why would you—"

Another rattle burst through the room and his body locked again, the beginnings of stress starting to creep into his bloodstream. His hand tightened against the back of his neck.

"Why would you need your old name?" she continued, undeterred, and he waved a sarcastic hand.

"Because I like to change things up."

"Damon."

"Why does it matter?"

She let out a dry laugh. "Because you've spent the past few days needling and provoking and trying to figure me out and now it's my turn." She took a persistent step closer and he exhaled darkly. "Why'd you change your name?"

"Kid—"

"How old were you? Was it recent or were you younger?"

"What are you, a litigator?"

"Did it have to do with your family?"

His stare flickered but before he could answer, a series of muffled bangs clamored from the pipes. He winced sharply, hiss slipping through his teeth—the sound messed with his head, blurring into gunshots, into the sear of a bullet tearing through his shoulder.

He struggled to distinguish memory from reality for a second.

"That's it, isn't it?"

His disoriented stare snapped back up to hers. "What?"

"You don't want to be associated with your parents."

"No one would want to be associated with my parents."

"So that's why you changed your name."

"The Department of Justice changed my name."

Another series of bangs shot through the room and he jolted a bit, hands lifting as if to block his ears— _fuck_ , he didn't like this. The sound was taunting, chaotic, bouncing around his head in a way that made the walls feel like they were shrinking in on him, and an onslaught of memories rattled at their locks. He shook his head hastily to get a hold of himself.

"So it wasn't your choice?"

"What wasn't my choice?"

"Changing your name?"

His jittery gaze shot around the dark room. "We're still on this?"

"We wouldn't be if you'd give a straight answer to literally any questi—"

A hiss of steam pierced the air and the sounds and images erupted in a flood: flashes of gunfire, tires screeching, yells, sirens. It was all compounding, gathering in his head like a storm, building and clawing and clanging and _shit_ , this wasn't happening, not here, not again, not over fucking pipes. He turned around sharply and screwed his eyes shut, teeth gritted, and the dark cloaked his heightening state, making it easy to mistake for evasiveness.

"Are you seriously—"

"Bonnie," he said sharply, trying to keep himself from tipping over the edge, and the distress in his voice must've registered because she promptly fell silent. He forced himself to take a deep breath—it was ragged, wavering, his nostrils flared in restraint.

He didn't have panic attacks often. Not anymore, at least. He used to have them all the time, bad ones, especially in his early teens, but a winning combo of weed and exposure therapy mostly broke him out of them. The weed was Katherine's idea—drugs had wrecked his childhood, so it'd taken some convincing to get him back on them—but the exposure therapy was his. He'd just started throwing himself into all of his triggers until eventually, a lot of grief later, they stopped triggering him. Self-directed flooding. He could still slip into a breakdown when enough stressors combined, though, and after the week he'd just had in Chicago, he was primed for losing it. Even over small things, things he could normally shrug off. It'd happened when they'd hit turbulence on the plane ride back, it'd happened when Caroline had faked being pregnant, and he knew with every over-actively firing nerve ending that it was happening again now.

A light touch on his shoulder made him jolt. "Damon—"

He held a hand back to fend her off, trying to control the spiraling pressure, the heat, the jumble in his head. "I'm fine."

Her voice was soft, hand firm on his shoulder. "You're definitely not fi—"

A growl of frustration tore from his throat as a loud grinding noise slid over the room. Skittering rats. His mom's eyes as she put a gun in his hand. The click of a deadbolt. The bite of her fingers. The crash of bullets hitting the wall around him. He strode over to the cellar door and struck a hand against it, forehead knocking onto the dark wood—where the fuck was Kai?

"Damon, I think you're having a panic attack."

A mirthless chuckle gritted through his teeth. "No shit." He heard her approaching him, footsteps slow, measured.

"Tell me how I can help."

"By staying out of i—" his voice cut into a sharp breath as another hiss of steam cut the room, slicing down his spine like a blade. His hand curled into a fist against the door, eyes shut so forcefully he could practically see capillaries.

"Is it the pipes?" she ventured, voice drawing closer. "The noise?"

"It's nothing, I just—" he knocked his head against the door a few times, flexing his jaw. He felt nauseated. Hot. Jittery. "I need—" fuck, he was starting to have trouble breathing. His lungs felt tight, breaths coming out harsh and fast, and after a few seconds, he felt a tentative hand on his back.

"Breathe," she murmured.

His jaw flared. "I'm fine."

"You're tachycardic," she countered, and something about her voice was surprisingly effective. It was calm. Even. The last time this'd happened this badly, he'd been in the middle of a subway and everyone just looked horrified.

"Are you hexing me again?" he gritted out, attempting to lighten the mood, and she quietly pressed on.

"Has this happened to you before?"

He tried to edge out a snarky reply but his chest felt like it was going to burst, so he merely nodded against the door.

"Has anything helped in the past?" she ventured, and distantly, he realized she was probably going to be a good doctor. Sure-handed. Capable. "Any mantras? Movements? Rituals of any kind?"

"Just the—" he swallowed to loosen his constricting throat, "—occasional human sacrifice."

"In through the nose," she said gently, ignoring the sarcasm and inhaling deeply to illustrate how she wanted him to breathe. For some reason, he found himself actually trying to mimic her. "Good, and out through the mouth." She let out a long, full breath that blew against his shoulder, and he tried to focus on the warmth of it, the pressure of her hand, the fact that the world couldn't actually be collapsing in on itself if she was so incomprehensibly stable.

It wasn't real.

He knew it wasn't real.

But _fuck_ , it felt so real, so goddamn real.

He hated that he couldn't control it. That he couldn't fight back. That despite everything he'd done to distance himself from his feelings, despite all the good things he'd given up to be able to handle the bad things, his experiences could still burst back in and level him. If there was _one_ thing he'd fought tooth and nail to never be again, it was powerless, and yet here he was, buckling under the weight of his fucked up life for what felt like the hundredth time.

Defenseless.

Furious.

A few rusty pipes and boom, he was a twelve-year-old kid shivering in a padlocked basement. A seven-year-old drug mule carrying a half mil's worth of blow. A fourteen-year-old with his hand being held over a running blender by a shitfaced foster dad. A nine-year-old holding a gun to a stranger's head.

And honestly, it wasn't even about the pipes. He knew it wasn't about the pipes. It wasn't about the locked cellar, either. It was about Chicago. It was about last week. One glimpse of his mother's face across that courtroom, a face he hadn't seen in seventeen years, a face that prison hadn't managed to dull in the slightest, and a fuse lit. A timer began ticking over his head. Losing it wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when, and thanks to Kai's shitty plumbing, that when was now.

He hadn't even heard her voice. She'd been twenty feet away, her features should've been a blur, but when he'd caught sight of her for that brief second, he saw her in disorienting, razing detail. The hollowed cheeks. The aquiline nose. The eyes like icepicks. A little thinner, a little grayer, but the lethal charisma still glittered off her like magic. She'd turned to look at him just before they carted her away.

"It'll be over soon, I promise," Bonnie murmured behind him, hand rubbing his back. Her voice sounded far away, muffled, like he was underwater, his ears only vaguely registering it. "You're going to be fine."

Disappointment would've done nothing to him.

Hatred, sadness, apology—same deal. He would've turned away and walked out of that courthouse without a care in the world. But Lily didn't work that way. Her entire existence was built upon her ability to make a mark, leave a scar. Every move she made refused not to matter. So when she caught his gaze for that sharp, fleeting second, possibly the last time she ever would, it wasn't just anything bolding the lines of her eyes.

It was pride.

Swelling, greedy pride, a pride that colonized everything he'd done in spite of her, everything he'd become in spite of her, and took effortless ownership of it. Made everything he was a reflection of her. Darkened any past success or future happiness of his with the shadow of her satisfaction. Slammed a copyright claim over his life. Put her name in the 'director' credits of his story.

She'd looked at the son who'd damned her to jail for likely the rest of her life and managed to make him feel like she'd _wanted_ him to. Like she was thrilled that he'd gotten her ruthlessness. Like she was puppeteering him just as much now as she had when he was a little kid, and everything was going to plan, and it was just a matter of time before he realized, before he gave in, before he became everything she wanted him to be, and _fuck_ , he hated her, he _hated_ her, _he fucking_ —

He slammed his hand against the door, the bad one, the one he'd sliced open a few days ago, and a white-hot flare of pain flashed over him. Bonnie's fingers tightened around his shoulder.

"You're doing great."

He lapsed into a frantic laugh. "No, I'm not."

The pipes started banging again and his eyes snapped shut—Christ, he needed to get out of here, he needed to get out of here _now._ "Kai!" He jangled the doorknob, nostrils flaring as the pipes continued clamoring above them. "Kai, let me the hell out of here!"

He heard Bonnie clear her throat behind him.

"Damon, he's not—" she reared back in shock as he lunged forward, shouldering into the door with his side, "he's not home—stop!"

He hurled himself at it again, teeth gritting against the pain, and he felt a hand grab his shoulder.

" _Damon_."

"I will break this fucking door."

He crashed into it again and Bonnie tried to turn him around, hand digging into his shoulder—he felt his mom's nails, felt the bullet tear into him, heard the pipes, the machine gun, the blender, and he surged back a few steps, forcing Bonnie to stumble out of his way as he shot his leg out to kick in the door.

"KAI!"

"Damon, _he's not here_!" she snapped, trying to shove him away from the door. "You're going to shatter your fibula, don't—"

He kicked it again, stare wild with the need to get out, wild with the need for freedom, for light, for open air, and suddenly, he felt a rough pair of hands forcing his head to the side. "Damon, look at me."

A sharp glance down revealed his mom's knife eyes, eyes that looked like his but meaner, eyes that sliced, that weighed, that valuated, except Lily never looked up at anybody, she only ever looked down. He saw the smugness. The ownership. He made to wrench away and the grip hardened, voice growing gritty with determination.

" _Look at me."_

He dropped his gaze back down.

The eyes were green now. Warm. Anxious. Kind.

"I need you to calm down."

His chest was rising and falling rapidly, stare hunted, breaths shallow in the dank air. "I need to get out of here."

"No, you don't," she replied, her voice low, charged. "You just need to breathe." He shook his head, trying to break her grip, and she swept her thumbs over his cheeks. "Hey, listen, just follow my breathing."

"I need to—"

"Follow my breathing, Damon."

She took a long, deep breath before exhaling evenly, stare fixed on his, worried, encouraging.

He tried and it came out ragged. "I can't."

She slid a hand up to his forehead, brushing his hair back. "Yes, you can."

He shook his head, panicked, the shriek of the pipes splitting his nerves. "I can't."

"Damon—" His eyes screwed shut, jaw flaring, and just as he felt the pressure reaching a flashpoint, she spat out an unexpected, "Roses are red, violets are blue, yellow sucks and you're a bad friend!"

And something about it was _just_ batshit enough to make his thoughts snag.

His bloodshot eyes flew open, fixing onto hers.

She looked anxious, uncertain, her gaze bright with the stress of a last ditch effort.

"What?"

She straightened a bit and cleared her throat. "It's a poem."

He blinked at her, chest heaving, heart still a wrecking ball in his chest. He felt the bite of confusion slowly edging away some of his panic.

"I know it's not Whitman or anything, but it was the only one I could think of. I wrote it for Stefan in fourth grade." She bit her lip, stare assessing his face, and it suddenly dawned on him what she was doing. He'd talked about Whitman when he needed to distract himself from her picking at his cut.

He merely stared at her, struggling to slow his breathing. He didn't know why, but he hadn't expected her to remember that.

"What did he do?"

The question surprised them both. "Stefan?"

"Yeah."

He realized he wanted to keep hearing her voice, the sincerity of it, the warmth of it. He wanted to hear a normal childhood story. He wanted to imagine her as a pouty fourth grader in a sunny classroom. He needed it.

"It was, uh, Valentine's Day." She swallowed the worry tightening her throat. "And Stefan was supposed to be my Valentine, but he had a crush on this girl named Ivy, and when she asked him if she could borrow his pink marker, he gave it to her even though I told him I'd need it to make him his card." She dropped her stare and he forced himself to focus on the dark fan of her eyelashes, on how stubbornly they curled upward. "So when the time came that I needed the pink marker, he told me Ivy had it, and when I asked him what I was supposed to use, he gave me the yellow one instead."

Silence hummed between them for a few seconds, tense and uncertain, before he forced a thick swallow. "I mean." Her stare flicked back up to his, and he drew in a labored breath. "Could've at least given you the red one."

She ruffled a bit. " _Right_? That's what I said." His lips flickered at the genuine indignation in her voice. "But he was too deep in Ivy-land to even think of that." She shook her head with a quiet scoff. "Who falls in love in fourth grade?"

"Seems like a Stefan move," he managed.

The tightness was loosening from his chest and he bowed his head, taking a minute to breathe it out. Close his eyes. Focus on the sound of his uneven heartbeat, on the warmth of her hands on his face. After a few seconds, he felt the unexpected brush of her fingers against his hair, easing it off his damp forehead with slow, even strokes, and he leaned into her hand instinctively, like he was some kind of pathetic, affection-starved stray getting pet for the first time.

He was too desperate for relief to play it cool.

"Yellow sucks and you're a bad friend," he ventured after a beat, more to try and fill the disorienting sense of intimacy between them with something, and she hummed.

"I was pretty talented."

"I like the rhyme scheme."

"Some of my best work."

"Mm."

He breathed in the warmth of her as she continued stroking his hair back, lingering on the poem, on how absurd it was. She wrote a hate poem over a marker. And she was still mad about it over a decade later.

It was ridiculous.

She was a ridiculous person.

Tangled and dark and simple and light.

And for some reason, distantly, in some faraway corner of his lungs, it was spurring something strange in him. Something stupid. Because in a world where people didn't make sense, where predetermined labels and damning definitions fell off if you did spastic enough dance moves, where mistakes and bad breaks could lead to a stubborn, optimistic question mark like her, who knew what he could turn out to be.

Seconds passed. Bloomed into minutes. His felt his heartbeat slowly syncing to hers, thoughts easing in the quiet lull of her breathing.

He tried to will himself to pull back.

He failed.

Her fingers were just too cool to move away from. She smelled too intoxicatingly much like coconut. His eyelids were too imprinted with the image of vengeful, ten-year-old version of her scrawling 'yellow sucks and you're a bad friend' over a cardstock heart to want to open.

So for just this moment, he left the lowered defenses down.

He allowed the weight to slip off his shoulders.

He let himself stay.

* * *

"We had sex and I freaked out," Caroline began, staring down at her lap.

They were sitting across from each other on the couch, the room quiet around them, dim in the glow of the fading candles. She was nervous, he could tell—she was wringing her hands and chewing her lip, and the vulnerability of it all instinctively lowered his guard.

"And I keep freaking out at you for unpredictable things," she continued, slowly shaking her head. "I'm… not reacting to you in rational ways, Stefan. I know that."

His brows slowly lowered over his eyes. He wasn't sure why, but even though that was pretty much exactly what he was thinking, he just… wasn't sure he liked the way it sounded coming from her. It felt too condemning.

"And I don't expect you to be cool with it," she said, shoulders easing into a quiet shrug. "I wouldn't be cool with it. You should want an explanation, and I should be able to give you one, but the reality is," she swallowed tightly, and after a beat, her stare finally lifted up to his, "I can't." Her eyes were dark, a little helpless. "I don't know why I'm being like this. I don't know why I'm reacting to you this way. Or maybe I do and I just don't want to know—point is, I can't promise you that's going to change anytime soon."

He eyed her quietly. A conflicting set of emotions was buzzing over his skin, making it hard to pinpoint how he felt about it. On one hand, he really liked the honesty, vague though it was. On the other, though, this all sounded so… defeatist. "Do you," he ventured, lifting a hand up to rub the back of his neck, "do you maybe have an idea of when it might?"

She shook her head.

"So… we're just… waiting it out?"

She shook it again, and his brows drew in. "That's not fair to you. And honestly," she dropped her stare again, "it's not great for me, either." Her lips flickered mirthlessly. "Believe it or not, I don't actually enjoy being a volatile trainwreck."

He frowned. "You're not a trainwreck."

"We hooked up and I cried."

The bluntness of the comment drew an unexpected laugh from him, and after a few seconds, her lips twitched. "I mean," he ventured, "would it make you feel better if I told you that wasn't the first time that's happened to me?"

A dry laugh welled up her throat. "Oh, God."

He pressed his lips together in a resigned line.

"What did you do? Actually," she lifted a hand, "don't tell me now."

"I'm not telling you ever."

"Tell me when it doesn't hit so close to home."

"Or never."

"It's still too soon."

"It'll always be too soon."

She merely eyed him for a second before smiling again, though this time, it was a little softer. A lighter, fading little thing as reality set back in. She glanced back down at her hands and he watched her for a second before dropping his own stare. "So."

She fiddled with a thread that'd come loose from their couch. "So."

He felt his throat tighten a bit around his next few words. "That's it, then."

Her shoulders eased into a small shrug. "I guess."

Something sunk in his chest, and he cleared his throat, casting the ridiculous feeling off. "After making me read all seventeen pages of that contract."

Her lips flickered. "Fifteen."

"Right," he murmured, stare fixed on her downcast eyes, on the way the candlelight bounced around in her pupils like it was trying to get out. "Footnotes."

Another silence fell over them, soft with sentiment, and after a suspended beat, he lifted a hand.

"Friends, then?"

She glanced up at his hand for a second before scoffing out a laugh. "I don't expect you to want to be friends with me, Stefan."

His brow furrowed. "Why?"

"After all this?"

"All what?" She merely continued staring at him and his expression drew into a considering look. "I mean, admittedly, trying to make me learn the Electric Slide was kind of a dick move," she lapsed into a low laugh, "and you basically ruined the mystery of houndstooth for me forever, but…" he waved his hand, eyes crinkling a bit at the corners, "other than that, you're not all bad."

"Thanks," she said sarcastically.

"Besides, we're both Bonnie's best friends, so we might as well suck it up and befriend each other, right?"

She gave a slow, considering nod. "True."

"And, I mean," he began in a slightly softer voice, stare sobering as it held hers. Her eyes were arrestingly pretty in the flickering light. "I kind of just…" his shoulders lifted into a vague shrug, "I want to know you, Caroline."

She stared back at him, expressionless.

His shoulders tensed.

He felt the warm ease fading a bit from the air.

That was the wrong thing to say, wasn't it.

"If that's okay."

She dropped her stare to her hands.

"I didn't mean it like—"

She pushed herself off the couch and began walking to the kitchen.

"I just meant like as a person," he called after her.

She disappeared into the kitchen and he dropped his head back against the couch with a harassed sigh—perfect. Of course he managed to fuck that up. Why the hell had he said it like that, all lingering and meaningful? 'I want to know you'—who was he, Nicholas Sparks?

He shook his head, chewing the inside of his cheek—he honestly couldn't remember the last time he'd ever had this much difficulty navigating a person. And he couldn't even pin it all on Caroline because it was him, too: the things he said, the looks he gave.

It was like she was tailor-made to throw him off in every way.

He sighed, dragging a hand over his face. He debated going after her, but before he could decide either way, she re-emerged from the kitchen.

His brow furrowed, hand dropping from his face.

She had two steaming mugs in her hand.

"We're going to need cocoa for this," she explained as she walked back over to the couch, pulling her legs up and folding them on top of each other. She held his mug out with an expectant look, taking a sip from her own, and it took him a second to react. "Stefan."

"Sorry," he said, shaking the surprise and taking the mug from her. A warm feeling spread through him as he cupped it in his hands, filling his veins with something fluttery. It was just… every time he thought he knew her, she did something that just… he never… his lips flickered.

"So, _friend_ ," she ventured, mouth tilting upwards as she settled herself across from him, and after an amused beat, her face slowly softened. "What do you want to know?"

He smiled, feeling something stir in his chest.

And a mere apartment over, Bonnie held a shivering Damon, easing his hair back with soft, lulling strokes.

And somewhere in the depths of the frozen Public Garden, Kai aimed a crossbow, a strange warble coming from his lips.

And all of them could pretty much agree on one thing.

This night wasn't really going according to plan.

* * *

 **Author's Note:** Welp. Part one of this two-part night has finally arrived! I can't even tell you how out of order I wrote all of this (things were just _not_ flowing for me man), so if y'all see any glaring continuity issues floating around, let me know and I'll try and tie them up. If you follow me on tumblr or twitter, you know that I've been hinting a bit at a return to the angst in this chapter (or at least parts of it), so I hope it gave you drama-lovers some stuff to sink your teeth into without killing too much of mah fluffy vibe. Steroline and Bamon were kind of inverses of each other in this chapter in that department (re: starting angsty and ending fluffy vs. starting fluffy and ending angsty), so I tried to keep the humor/drama balance even that way. Hope you enjoyed it, and also woot for some new (or more deeply explored) faces, right? Kai and the future Ms. Cuddles are going to be featuring quite a bit more from now on, so I hope you liked them! Anyway, please drop some feedback if you can and thanks so much for reading!


	16. A Change is Gonna Come

Six Mornings After

Chapter Sixteen: A Change is Gonna Come

* * *

Bonnie wasn't sure how much time had gone by.

Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more. She didn't know.

All she knew was she was going to stand there with Damon for as long as he needed her to, and given the way his hands were gathered into loose fistfuls around her dress, forehead a warm press against hers, breaths syncopated with the rise and fall of her chest, he needed her to.

Honestly, she hadn't really known what to do when he'd started losing it earlier. She remembered feeling alarmed, a little helpless, like some plastic bag caught in the middle of a hurricane, but now? Now, in the aftershock of it all, her veins were thrumming with something quieter. Instinctive. It softened the brush of her fingers along his hair. Warmed the reassuring heat of her body against his.

It wasn't quite the way she felt as a doctor—it was more personal than that, more intimate—but it had the same certainty. The same stalwart resolution to protect. And maybe it was just her own abandonment issues surfacing, maybe she was just projecting and he didn't need her there at all, but for whatever reason, every stitch of her body needed him to know she wasn't going anywhere. So she held him tight in the cool darkness, easing his hair back as he shivered, the world fading away in feathers.

Until Kai burst in from the top of the stairs.

"Friends?" he called out, a slice of light from the flashlight cutting over them, and Damon immediately stiffened against her, molten frame going rigid. He pulled his head back and glanced down at his fisted hands and their intertwined frames for a long, frozen second, and just before he pulled away, a streak of light lit his face.

His eyes were sharp with disorientation.

"Are you okay?" Kai called down, the light bobbling as he started making his way down the stairs, and Damon disentangled himself hastily, shoving a stiff hand through his hair.

"We're, uh," his voice was thickly graveled and he cleared his throat, "we're fine, just—" he was looking anywhere but at her, "ready to get the hell out of here, honestly." He lapsed into a hollow chuckle, lifting a hand to rub the back of his neck, and Bonnie watched him with a hesitant look.

He was edgy. Restless. And clearly not happy with himself.

She took a tentative step closer to him. "Are you," she began, "are you actually okay, or—?"

"Fine," he said a little too quickly, slicing his stare up to meet hers. His lips flickered up into a stiff smile, eyes sharp, as if preempting a fight, and her brows notched upward.

He definitely wasn't fine.

"Damon," she shook her head, shoulders lifting in earnest offering, "I mean, you know I'm not judging or anything. Like, God, after yesterday, I'd be the last person with any ri—"

"Can we just get out of here?" he cut in abruptly, and she blinked at him, caught off-guard. He shrugged, trying to come off as casual despite the stiffness of the frame. "I'm pretty over this basement."

He held her gaze for a tense beat, stubborn, a little impatient, and she chewed her lip before giving a reluctant nod. "Sure." She straightened out her dress. "Yeah, let's go." She turned around and began heading up the stairs, trying to ignore her uneasiness with the reaction.

He was being defensive. That was expected—she used to do the same thing to Stefan after breakdowns. Problem was, that meant she knew firsthand how unproductive it was, and how much it prolonged her actually moving on from things. And sure, maybe she was being a giant, hypocritical pot to his doesn't-deal-with-childhood-trauma kettle, but that didn't stop her from worrying all the same.

Plus, his own wellbeing aside, defensiveness meant he was probably going to be weird around her for the rest of the night, which was just… as if the night needed to get any weirder. But hey, who knows, maybe he was fine. Maybe this was just his knee-jerk reaction and he'd magically be over it in a few minutes. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.

She shot a brief glance over her shoulder as she approached the landing, expecting to find an impatient stare aimed back at her, but instead, he was staring down at the floor.

And even from a distance, she could see the rattled look in his eyes.

Her lips pressed into a slow, worried line.

Or not.

"I'm going to go reset the circuit breaker," he said suddenly, and before anyone could really react, he was moving up the stairs. She felt a flare of warmth as he brushed past her, his gaze fixed forward, not straying so much as a degree in her direction.

"Do you need me to show you where it—"

"Basement, right?"

She watched his retreating form with a hesitant look—was another basement really where he needed to be right now? "Bottom floor, second door to the left."

"Got it."

He disappeared from the cellar without another word, and after a few seconds, the click of the front door carried through the apartment.

She stared out the empty doorway for a tense beat before swinging her gaze back over to Kai, who was gloriously unaware of all the social cues flying around him, and saying what any mature, serious, competent twenty-four year old would in the same situation.

"Do you have any pop tarts?"

* * *

Caroline figured there were a lot of ways this whole 'get to know each other' thing her and Stefan were doing could go. Like an explosion of awkward silence where they realized they had nothing to talk about. Or a clipped exchange where their old dynamic resurfaced in the absence of physical distraction. Or a heated conversation about principles and life philosophies that reminded them of just how much they annoyed each other.

Instead she almost had milk coming out of her nose.

"You actually—" Stefan struggled to get out between laughs, the two of them cast in a warm glow in the dancing candlelight, "you actually wrote ' _toodles_ '?"

" _Listen_ ," she said, trying and failing to reign her own laughter in, "sometimes you have to make a point."

"Was the point that you walk around with a Pomeranian in your purse!?"

She reached back and threw a pillow at him that he evaded easily. "The _point_ was that I wasn't afraid of him!"

"The dean of Emory."

"Yes."

"Because why would you be afraid of the man who can expel you?"

She shrugged, smile fighting the corners of her mouth, and he shook his head in bright-eyed bewilderment. The naked disbelief made her lapse into another laugh, and pretty soon his own shoulders were shaking again.

And the crazy thing was, it felt normal. Totally and completely normal. Because somehow, over the past hour, guarded smiles had sprung free into wide, careless grins. Self-conscious limbs had melted into animated sprawls. The quiet glow of the candles had grown brighter, bolder, to the point where the flickering flames seemed to be laughing along with them. And maybe some of that was just a natural shift in chemistry. Maybe that was just what happened when two people genuinely agreed to be friends.

But if she was being honest with herself, she knew it mostly came down to her, to a conscious decision she'd made the second he'd told her he wanted to know her better. It'd been her usual cue to bolt. To flip into defense-mode, have a frighteningly detailed logic tree of possible outcomes big bang into her head, and choose the one that kept her as far away from getting hurt or losing control as possible.

And yet, she didn't.

Or rather, she couldn't.

Because in that moment, with the weight of five straight days of overanalyzing and frantic self-preservation weighing down on her shoulders, with the drain of her panicked overreaction from earlier still leadening the blood in her veins, she was surprised to realize she just didn't have the energy. It was exhausting. She was _exhausted._ The defensiveness, the guardedness, the fear, the outmaneuvering—the prospect of going through that whole song and dance again made her bones _ache_ , it was so tiring _._ She couldn't bring herself to do any of it.

So she didn't _._

She got up and got some hot chocolate.

She ignored the alarm bells blaring in her head.

She asked him what he wanted to know.

And now here they were, barely an hour later, discussing the highlights of her colorful history with the Emory Athletic Association.

"Okay, so just to recap," Stefan managed after a few seconds, raising a hand to try and reign himself in.

"Mm-hmm."

"You," he briefly broke into another laugh before forcing it back, clearing his throat, "you planned the homecoming dance at the same time as the football game—"

" _False_ ," she cut in, whipping a sharp finger up to correct him, "I planned the homecoming dance two days _after_ the football game but then some stupid little thunderstorm hit—"

"Hurricane."

"—and football players were such babies that they couldn't play through a little rain—"

"Hurricane."

"—so they moved it to the same night as the dance like inconsiderate assholes."

"Right."

"Big distinction."

"Sorry."

"Forgiven—continue."

"And then," he pressed on, lips twitching, "to make sure that people actually came to the dance, you—" he lapsed into another laugh and shook his head to stifle it, "you made it an assignment for the class you TA'd?"

Her hands flew up, scattering the flames of the coffee table candles. "What better place to learn about intro psych than a school dance?"

"And then when you got a letter from the dean—"

" _After_ , I'd like to add, a perfectly executed party."

"—you wrote back with a giant list—"

"Systematic overview. _"_

" _—_ of all the sexual assault cases filed against frats and told him that if he really cared about people being forced to do things they didn't want to _—_ "

"He could start there, and if he didn't, me and CNN would," she supplied, shrugging frankly. "I have a thing for calling CNN."

"And then you," he stifled another laugh, "you signed it _'toodles'_?"

"No, first I commented on the sexism of prioritizing the value of traditionally masculine things like a football game over all of the money and time and planning that go into traditionally feminine things like a dance," she said, lifting a punchy finger in correction. " _Then_ I signed it 'toodles'."

He merely stared at her in a glittering mixture of bewilderment and awe, eyes bright in the shadowed room. "You are _ridiculous."_

"Effective _._ "

"Terrifying."

"Productive."

"And impressive as hell."

Her lips curled up as she leaned back against the couch, shrugging and taking a sip of her lukewarm cocoa. "That, we can agree on."

"Like I'd say you should be a lawyer but I'm pretty sure you'd just get disbarred."

She stuck her tongue out at him. "Laws are for boring people."

"Jesus, how did I risk being on your bad side for three years?" he asked, ignoring the jab. "Like it's a miracle I never came home to an eviction notice or something."

"Mmm, no, see," she began, swallowing her last mouthful of cocoa and waving the mug around, "contrary to popular belief, I only use my powers to combat evil. You were just annoying."

His eyes shone with amusement. "'Course."

"Although one time I did—" she cut herself off after a second, realizing she wasn't actually sure they were at the point where they could talk about things they'd done to each other, and his brow furrowed.

"What?"

She cleared her throat. "Nothing."

His eyes slowly thinned, taking on a bit of a glitter. "You did something to me, didn't you?"

She tried not to smile and it made her look six thousand times more suspicious. "No."

He stared at her.

"Maybe."

His eyes widened and she burst out laughing.

"It was barely anything."

"Tell me."

"Seriously, it—"

" _Caroline."_

"Okay, okay!" She took a second to stifle her giggles. "So, uh, you remember that time when your ringtone was acting up?"

His eyes narrowed. "How do you know abo—" and then they slowly widened in realization. "That was you!?"

"You were being _so obnoxious_ about your stupid music taste!" she claimed in her defense, pushing her hair out of her face. "Like you literally sat right in that armchair and went on a forty-five minute rant about 'music these days' so I swiped your phone when you weren't looking and downloaded some app that overwrote all your audio settings."

"Caroline, my phone blasted S&M anytime I got a notification for a _week_."

She burst into a loud laugh and the corners of his mouth started twitching.

"It went off during an internship interview!"

She began laughing harder, veering into a cackle.

"I had to get a new phone!"

She shook her head, eyes tearing with laughter. "I—" she inhaled sharply, "I'm t-trying to say sorry but I can't because I'm not."

"You're _such_ an asshole," he exclaimed, stare bright with humor, and she let out a dramatic scoff.

"Oh, like you never did anything to me?"

"No, I didn't!" he replied, though after a second his face loosened a bit. And then it stilled. And then it furrowed. "Well, actually…"

Her laughter died on her tongue, loose body suddenly stiffening. "What?"

He pressed his lips together, stare taking on a gleam. " _Mmmm…_."

"What did you do?"

"Never mind."

A flare of indignation shot through her. "Stefan."

"It's nothing."

"I told you what I did!"

"Yeah," he mused, "but I think I'm going to let you wonder for a while."

Her eyes slowly narrowed in speculation. "I see what this is."

"Do you?"

"You didn't actually do anything, so your way of getting back at me is pretending you did so I go back and obsess over every weird, unexplained thing that's ever happened to me to try and figure it out."

He shrugged, waving a whimsical hand. "Let's go with that."

"I know it's that."

"Just a hint, though—you never actually noticed it." Her eyes tapered as his lips curled up. "What I did to you, I mean. But who cares, since I'm making it up?"

She merely stared at him for a long, thrumming moment, the air filled with the whistling tension of two cowboys standing on opposite ends of a gunfight.

A vast, meandering desert sprawled around them.

Sunlight winked off their badges.

Tumbleweeds blew in the distance.

She snapped first. "I'm going to figure it out."

"Doubt it."

"Well, then I'm going to find a way to make you tell me."

"Good luck."

"If you thought the Rihanna ringtone was bad—"

"I actually kind of liked it after a few days."

"—then you have no idea what's ahead of you."

" _Na na na na na come on_." He raised a hand in a clubby fist pump and she couldn't help but snort, intense façade breaking. His deadpan face eased into a smile—one of those twinkling, warm ones that reminded her of honey spilling off a spoon— and predictably, annoyingly, her stomach did a little flutter.

Luckily, something behind her seemed to distract him before she could dwell too much on it.

"Well, well, look who's up. Hey there, sleepy girl."

She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the cat, who'd been sleeping so profoundly on the armchair for the past few hours that Caroline had asked her if she was dead about five times, was pulling herself into a long, luxurious stretch.

"So you are alive," Caroline drawled, lips twitching despite herself as the cat let out a squeaky yawn. "Too bad."

"Awww, she doesn't mean that," Stefan cooed, and the cat responded to the sound immediately, hopping right off the armchair and up into the space between them. She was purring before he even touched her.

Caroline snorted. "Do you two need some privacy?"

"What you just heard right there is called _jea-lou-sy_ ," he enunciated to the cat, scratching her chin dotingly with both hands. "It's a very ugly human emotion that gets the best of us sometimes, but…" he sighed and Caroline shook her head, "there's nothing we can really do about it."

The cat slow-blinked at him, purring blissfully, eyes heavy-lidded slits of amber, and for a brief, startling moment, Caroline realized she did actually feel a little… jealous. Or not jealous, really. Envious. Envious of the fact things were so simple for this cat, that she could just hop onto his lap and indulge in his hands and his warmth and his honey smile without having an existential crisis about it.

Must be nice.

"Do you think we should name her?"

The question jolted her out of her thoughts and she blinked. Jesus Christ. Had she just been jealous of a _cat_?

That's it.

It was settled.

She was getting a therapist.

"Isn't that a little permanent?" she asked, swallowing quickly, and he shrugged.

"It'd just be for now. Anything's better than 'cat'."

She pressed a hand to her chest. "On behalf of Holly Golightly, I'm offended."

"What about Holly?" he asked, and she pulled a face at the same time as the cat let out a disgruntled meow. He slipped into a chuckle. "Okay, resounding no."

"Too derivative."

"I was trying to be festive. You know, 'cause it's Christmas time? Holly?"

"Ha."

He glanced down at the cat, who'd pointedly stopped purring, and clucked his tongue. "Tough crowd."

"We should just let Bonnie name her," Caroline said, sinking back against the pillows. "She's been dying to get a cat for years."

"I know," he chuckled, scratching between the cat's ears. "I always wondered why she didn't get one in college and now, well," he waved in her general direction, and Caroline held her hands up in jazzy self-advertisement.

"Me."

"Yep."

"Well, that and Matt was allergic, so."

It was a thoughtless statement, unintended to carry any kind of weight, but it still managed to introduce a current into the room. Just like all the other Matt mentions had. Just like all the Elena mentions had. It was the unspoken game they were playing, a verbal dance where they'd casually mention their exes without actually talking about them. They'd been surprisingly open about everything else over the past hour—childhood stories, embarrassing moments, college adventures—but their murky romantic histories seemed to be something of a tacitly agreed upon No Man's Land.

When he'd talked about his favorite camping trip to Colorado, he briefly mentioned it was for him and Elena's anniversary and that was it. When they'd covered the whens and wheres of their first times, she told him hers was Matt in junior year and left it at that. And so the dance continued, the two names coming up a handful of times in a variety of different contexts, and each time they were handled the same way: brief pause, respectful nod, new subject.

Except this time was different.

She could tell the by the way his stare looked when it flickered up to hers. It was cautious. Probing. "What, uh…" his voice was easy, deceitfully casual, "what was Matt like? I mean, if you don't mind my asking."

She felt her shoulders instinctively seize a bit and she tried to cast the reaction off, dropping her stare to her hands. "Asking's fine."

They had to talk about it eventually. It was the elephant in the room, big and obvious and floating over their heads like a light-up blimp. _None of this frothy chit-chat matters_ , it read in a glitzy, scrolling marquee, waving its animatronic trunk, _y'all are fake._

Besides, there really wasn't any reason _not_ to talk to him about it at this point. He'd held her sobbing in a bathtub. He'd watched her flip out over not being able to handle sex with him. He'd endured approximately sixty-five thousand of her mood swings. Honestly, talking about what happened would probably make her seem _less_ crazy.

Didn't make the prospect of it any easier, though.

She felt her throat close up a bit as she tried to think of where to even start. "Um," she began, tucking a wayward lock of hair behind her ear, "Matt… Matt was—"

The power suddenly surged back in a flood of light, startling them both enough to make them jump. The cat aimed an angry meow at the ceiling. A song that'd been cut off midway through resumed its poppy melody. The hum of the central heating drifted back over the room. She looked at Stefan, and he looked at her, and an awkward beat passed as they regarded each other in the bright, exposing overhead light. The intimate feel of the room was gone. It felt too big, suddenly, the lighting too clinical for such a personal conversation.

He cleared his throat. "Maybe we should take a break from 20 Questions?"

" _Yes_ ," she replied a little too eagerly, desperate for a way out of the situation. She'd get to Matt. And he'd get to Elena. Eventually. Just not now. Not quite yet. "I have some work to do anyway."

"Same."

She waved a hand. "Perfect."

They held each other's gazes for another stilted beat before he aimed a thumb over his shoulder. "I'll just get my stuff."

"Sounds good."

He pushed himself up to his feet with a brief smile before disappearing into the kitchen, and she dropped her head back with a sigh, more relieved for the out than she was entirely proud of. It shouldn't affect her so much. She knew it shouldn't. But God, when she'd actually thought of how to even begin to tell the story of her and Matt, of how to capture just how blindingly brightly it all started out, of how to make it make sense to someone so far outside of it, it made her stomach turn inside out.

She'd never actually had to tell anyone about it before. Not in full. The people who needed to know were the same people who'd seen it all in real-time—Bonnie, Tyler, her Mom, a few others—so she'd never had to find the words to explain it to them. More casual friends only knew about it in summary—vague details, a broad impression of it not being a good relationship—and generally, it was left at that.

This, though… this was the first time she'd ever been confronted with the prospect of diving into old memories, blowing the dust off them, and putting some of the best and worst years of her life into words.

And it was unsettling.

So instead, she stared at the ceiling with a grateful look, silently thanking whatever God it was that switched the power back on and saved her sanity.

Or, you know, whatever was left of it.

* * *

Damon flipped the circuit box closed with a sharp flick of his wrist.

It was a tense movement. Irritable. A little jittery.

And incidentally, so was he.

See, the panic attack was one thing. And sure, yeah, it blew—in fact, his hands were still shaking a little and his heart had yet to completely slow down. But panic attacks were familiar. He knew the routine. They came, they made him think he was literally fucking dying, and then after however long, no matter how convinced he was the anxiety had eaten his skin off and he was all exposed nerve endings, they lifted. And the world settled. And life went on.

What wasn't familiar was having someone hold him through one. Someone who kept existing even after the panic left. Someone who didn't lift.

And it wasn't just that, honestly, because Katherine had pulled him through quite a few of them in the past. She was tough. Cynical. Her arms would lock tightly around him, jaw set, damning the world and the fucked up people in it. She didn't try to make it better. She didn't comfort him or soften the edges off anything. She just stayed till it was over and then never brought it up again.

This was different.

This was Bonnie.

Bonnie, with the worried eyes and the cartoonishly expressive face. Bonnie, with the hands and the hope and the fourth grade poems. Bonnie, with the seeming need to care about everyone around her, regardless of if they wanted her to or not.

And okay, yeah, maybe his current off-kilter state wasn't entirely on her. Maybe there was a part of him who couldn't get over the role he'd played in all of this, the way he'd invited her in—melted really, like a clock in a fucking Dali painting. Maybe he was a little stuck on the fact that by the time Kai had shown up after Christ knew how long, his head was all feathers.

Floaty, useless goddamn feathers.

He scrubbed a sharp hand over his features, thick laugh slipping up his throat—feathers. _Christ_.

He didn't do this. He didn't do melting and feathers. That was for the Stefans of the world, the Tylers, hell, even the Carolines when she got over whatever weird self-flagellation phase she was going through. They were melty people from feathery worlds and he was happy for them, really, he was. But him? Katherine? They were gutter kids. The only feathers they dealt with were from the pigeons trying to steal the sandwiches they'd stolen from someone else. If they felt like they were melting, they were on a hallucinogenic.

It was a different world.

Strict melty-feathery-free zone.

He glanced out the basement door to the hallway, to the newfound light spilling over the stairs, and despite his general dislike of basements, he wasn't particularly eager to leave this one. He didn't know how to walk back into that apartment and act normal. He felt weird, on-edge—exposed, almost, like a piece of his glossy seal had been chipped off and now unwanted things could slip in and out. It drew a flutter of resentment through him, honestly. She'd cracked his varnish so casually, so thoughtlessly, like it wasn't something he relied on, and for what?

For shits and giggles? To see if she could?

He let out a dark sigh, knocking his head back against the wall. He knew he was being unfair, but the defensiveness was flowing sharp and hot in his veins and it blurred the logic right out of him. He wasn't thinking straight. He should just ditch this date altogether. Head back to 2B to terrorize Stefan and Caroline about their not-so-secret secret relationship. Anything to get his mind off things.

His jaw tightened a bit—but Bonnie was alone up there with Kai. And yeah, maybe Kai wasn't too bad, and maybe Bonnie was tougher than she looked, but he still felt a tug of worry about leaving her there by herself. He scoffed again, shaking his head— _worry_. Concern.

Unwanted things.

The three flights of stairs felt shorter than he'd liked, and by the time he slipped back into Kai's apartment, he was exactly zero percent more ready for dealing with anything than he was before. On the bright side, though, there weren't a whole lot of ways to prepare for walking in on Bonnie and Kai standing over a giant, split open swan carcass with safety goggles on.

"—and you see how it loops and coils around the breastplate? That's to amplify the sound waves."

"I've literally never seen a trachea this long."

"Sweet, right?"

"Can I take a picture?"

"Totes!"

"Nora's going to be so jealous."

Bonnie glanced around for her phone and stiffened a bit when her gaze landed on Damon standing in the doorway. "Oh." She straightened. "Hey." Her eyes looked a little buggy in her magnifying goggles, hair a mess of curls, and instantly, unwantedly, he felt a bit of the cool distance warm right off him.

"Damon!" Kai sang, pert smile springing up on his face, and Damon gave a dry nod at the swan beneath him.

"Didn't mean to interrupt anatomy lab."

"Nonsense, you're right on time—come take a look!"

He lifted a firm hand in protest. "I'm good."

"No, you're not." His stare flickered over to Bonnie, body tensing a bit as she began rushing over to him, but her eyes were fixed on his hand. "Your cut opened again—damn it, Damon."

He glanced down at his hand as she took it in hers—he'd noticed it bleeding when he was messing with the circuit box, but he hadn't thought much of it. Hardly the first cut he'd just grinned and beared it through. She let out a low hiss as she inspected it, turning his palm toward the light.

"I need to reclean this."

"It's fine," he said, pulling his hand free, and she scoffed.

"It's not fine, it's got splinters in it."

"I'll deal with it later."

"It'll be infected later—hey, Kai?" she called over her shoulder, ignoring his sigh, "do you have a first aid kit?"

"Think so!"

"I don't need a first aid kit."

"Preferably one with a set of tweezers?"

"I don't—" Damon's jaw set as she plucked his hand back up, bringing it up to her ridiculous goggled eyes. "Bonnie."

"I need to deal with this now or it'll get worse."

"Then let it get worse."

"That's stupid, why would I do that?"

"You're not doing anything, it's not your call."

"Medicine's absolutely my call."

"And this is absolutely my hand."

"I don't care."

"Actually, you care too much."

"What does that even mean?"

"It means I don't need you to fucking fix me."

It was a sharp flare of words, an unintended knife of a response that made her rear her head back in surprise. Her eyes were cautious. Even the comical frame of the goggles did little to lighten them.

"I—sorry," she said, dropping his hand, and he felt a low flutter of guilt course through him.

"It's fine."

He glanced away from her, not quite able to meet her stare, and she eyed him for a few more seconds before clearing her throat. "Look, Damon, I…" she began, dropping her stare, "I know you don't like what happened in the basement earlier—"

Her felt a surge of resentment over the gall of the pivot. "This isn't about that."

"Yes, it is," she sighed, and his brows flew up at the certainty in her voice.

"I'm sorry, are my thoughts your call now, too?"

"No," she acknowledged, "but you're clearly being defensive so I'm just trying to move this along."

"Okay, well, in that case, let me help you: I don't care about the basement," he countered, feeling himself caring more by the second. "I don't care about the panic attack. I've had them before, I'll have them again, circle of life—what I _do_ care about is you acting like one little emotional glitch somehow means you know me and get to tell me what to do."

Her jaw set a bit. "I'm not trying to tell you what to do."

"Then what are you trying to do?"

"I don't know, Damon—I'm a med student, your hand was cut, maybe I was just trying to help?"

"I don't want your help," he countered swiftly. His shoulders lifted into a stiff, cool shrug. "And more importantly, I don't need it."

She merely stared at him for a long beat. "Fine."

His lips thinned into a smile. "Fine."

A tense silence stretched between them like a long string of taffy, thick with subtext, heavy under the weight of their fixed stares. Her face was probing and frank. Everything about it was saying 'I know what you're doing' and the presumption of it was setting his teeth on edge.

"Got the first aid kit!"

Neither of them turned when an oblivious Kai swept back into the room, waving around a white box with a bright grin.

"Not going to lie, I fly through these things like whoa, so I wasn't super sure I had one left, but I found this bad boy tucked behind my shape-shifting cactu—"

His voice cut out as Bonnie wordlessly grabbed the kit out of his hand and flicked it open, plucking a thick tube from the top. She handed it to Damon without bothering to meet his stare. "At least put this on." He glanced at it for a beat too long and she sighed, shooting Kai a tired look. "Can you hand this to him so it isn't coming from me?"

Damon rolled his eyes and took it from her. "Relax."

Her brows flickered up in an 'oh, _I need to relax_?' look, and he merely held her gaze in a stubborn ' _yes'_ of a reply.

"Uhhhh," Kai said after a stiff beat, glancing between the two of them and scrunching his nose, "is there like a lot of awkward sauce swirling around this room or is it just me?"

"It's just you," Damon said in unison with Bonnie's, "It's not just you."

Kai merely stared at them, eyes drawing into puzzled slits. "This wasn't covered in any of my dinner party e-books."

"You know what would help, bud?" Damon said, switching his attention to Kai and giving him a winsome clap on the shoulder. "Some more of that Scotch."

"Right," Bonnie demurred, "because alcohol solves everything."

His gaze shot back over to hers, lighting with a perverse kind of delight. "Are you seriously going to get on my case about drinking when less than twelve hours ago your blood type was 'tequila'?" Her eyes tapered and he lifted his palms. "I only ask because I'd want to get it on film—pretty sure it's a Guinness World Record for hypocrisy."

"Yesterday was the most destructive day I've had in years," she countered, voice frank and a little hard. "Is that really where you want to set your bar for normal?"

"Actually, I set it a lot lower." It was a confident reply that dared her to have a problem with it, and as if to emphasize the sentiment, he took a sidling step closer, face drawing into a mocking frown. "Does that bother you?"

She stared at him for a long beat. He expected irritation, distaste, disappointment—any number of things that usually got thrown his way when people started realizing he was perfectly content being a lost cause—but instead, much to his jaw-tightening chagrin, she looked… perceptive. Knowing, even.

"Not as much as it bothers you."

He felt a sharp flicker of something shoot through him, but he wasn't sure what it was.

"I'm going to go pre-heat the oven," she told Kai after a second, shooting him a half-hearted smile. "Or, you know, one of them. I'll be in the kitchen if you need anything."

Damon watched her walk off with a narrowed look, absently chewing the inside of his cheek. His skin was buzzing with a strange blend of irritation and unease, and it took him more effort than he liked to cast the feeling off.

"Is this like… foreplay for you guys?"

He glanced over at Kai, who was peering at him with a curious look.

"I just can't tell the difference between regular tension and sexual tension," he offered by way of explanation, shoulders lifting into a floppy shrug. "Like on TV, people always go from fighting to suddenly having sex and I never understand what happened. When I get mad at people, I invent specifically tailored torture devices and elaborate blueprints on how I'd use them." Damon merely blinked at him and he rolled his eyes. "But I don't actually use them." He frowned. "Usually."

"Think it's time for that Scotch."

Kai's face sprung into a sunny smile. "Blue label or black label?"

He shot a dark gaze over to the kitchen, where Bonnie's shadow was busily skittering across the floor, and the corners of lips quirked into a dry line. "Both."

* * *

It happened about every ten minutes.

There'd be typing. Some sighs. A few mutters. The sound of a page turning. The scribble of a jotting pen. The quiet whir of a laptop fan. The rustle of shifting limbs. And then, without any kind of prelude:

"Was it my toothbrush? Did you put it in the toilet or something?"

"Nope."

"No, you didn't put it in toilet water or no, you didn't mess with my toothbrush?"

"Both."

"You mean neither?"

"Whichever."

Caroline's eyes narrowed over the edge of her laptop, bright with curiosity, and Stefan's lips quirked as he felt them bore into his profile. He kept his stare trained on his case files.

"I feel like there was a trick in the wording of that."

"Maybe."

"But I feel like you're too smug to hide that well—like it'd be all over your face that you were proud of yourself."

His mouth curled further. "Maybe."

"But then again, maybe you're banking on me thinking that and you're actually really good at hiding it."

"Maybe."

"Cat, is he lying?" She nudged the ball of fur curled at the other end of the couch with her foot and it let out a disgruntled meow. "What does that mean?" She nudged her again and the cat hopped off the couch with an annoyed burble and sauntered down the hallway. "Hey!"

"Listening to the slow decline of your sanity is honestly so satisfying," he observed, casually turning the page, and he caught her sticking her tongue out at him from the corner of his eye.

It was kind of disorienting, if he was being honest, seeing this side of her. Loose. Fun. A little mischievous. He'd already known she was competitive—he'd gotten into enough frosty debates with her in the past to figure that out—but he'd only ever really seen the biting side of it. The intense perfectionism. The grating need to one-up.

This was different.

This was playful. This was realizing that her incisive eyes could dance. Her sharp cheeks could dimple as she grinned. Her upturned nose could crinkle till her freckles were touching. And sure, maybe he'd seen flickers of those things before, but they were always just that—flickers. Flares. Little moments that read like aberrations, that were neither substantial nor sustained enough to feel like some hidden 'real her'.

But now here she was, casually vibrant and loose, as if she'd never been anything else. As if this is who she always was. As if it wasn't just at odds with who he used to think she was, but even how he'd recently come to see her, because there was no fragility to this Caroline. No guardedness. He didn't feel like he was blindly wandering through some booby-trapped labyrinth she kept around herself, like the slightest of missteps could suddenly detonate a bomb.

She was steady. Confident.

His snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye: she was staring at her screen with a rapt little frown, hair an unkempt bun of gold atop her head, so focused a random passerby would think she was sifting through nuclear codes instead of ad campaigns. Her eyes thinned a bit as she read something and then she lapsed into a scoff, hitting the backspace key in loud, pointed strokes. " _Morons_."

The corners of his mouth instinctively quirked. Bonnie had always said he didn't know the Caroline she knew, that he just didn't see the millions of things she saw in her, and he'd always thought that was kind of bullshit, but now? Now, he could see it. Bonnie's Caroline. Spirited. Brassy. A flame of a girl who changed ringtones and blackmailed people into going to her homecoming dance. A hell-raiser with a sparkling stare and a laugh like a bell. A gunner who didn't give up on the things she cared about.

Or the people she cared about.

Even when she probably should.

"What about my shampoo?"

The question snapped him out of his thoughts. "What?"

"My shampoo," she repeated, gaze suddenly back on his, and his lips quirked as he realized she was right back to her detective routine. Relentless.

"What about it?"

"Did you do something to it?"

"Like what?"

She scoffed. "I don't know, like put some peroxide in it or replace it with something gross?"

"Don't you think you would've noticed that?"

Her lips pursed at the non-answer. "So no, then?"

He shrugged, settling back into his chair with a blithe air. "Never say never."

"Was it at all bathroom-related?"

"I don't feel comfortable answering that broad of a question."

"Do you feel comfortable with pillows being hurled at your face?"

"Wha— _ow_!" he said with a harassed laugh as a throw pillow she'd flung at him bounced off his head. "Badgering the witness!"

"You've got to give me something to go off!"

"I am!"

She plucked another pillow up and he lifted his hands up, laughing. "Okay, okay, fine—no, it's not bathroom-related."

She lowered the pillow with a shrewd look. "What about my bed?"

He snorted. "What would I have done to your bed?"

"Put something that smells really bad underneath it?"

He laughed. "What?"

"I don't know, you tell me."

"No."

"No, you won't tell me?"

"No, I haven't touched your bed," he explained, though the humor promptly faded from his face. "Or, I mean," he waved a hand, slowly growing a little awkward, "not, uh," he shook his head briefly—shit, he was not handling this well, "you know what I mean."

And judging from the way her bright expression faltered, she knew exactly what he meant. He had touched her bed. She'd kissed him there earlier today, right after she'd presented him with the contract. Climbed him, really—her whole body had gone molten on top of his. Just like it had on the couch. Just like it always did.

"Right," she supplied after second, clearing her throat. "Right, so, no bed."

"No bed."

It felt strangely like an unspoken agreement to stay away from her bed, which naturally just got him thinking about the kinds of things they'd do on her bed.

"What about the kitchen?" she asked, as if trying to pivot the conversation somewhere safer—maybe she thought he'd messed with her food or something—but almost immediately, the memory of them tangled half-naked on the kitchen table stretched between them.

"Uh," he blinked, smiling a little stiffly, "no."

She seemed to catch onto his line of thought because she averted her eyes. "Great."

He promptly followed suit, dropping his stare back down to his file. The words began blurring on the screen, translating into nonsense in his newfound distracted state, so he focused on his thumb instead. The short strip of nail. The lines around the knuckle. The sound she'd made in his ear when he'd slid it between her—

He flipped his case folder shut with a sharp flick of his wrist, sitting up straighter in the armchair. No. He wasn't doing this. He wasn't going there. They'd made a deal—a very clear, very platonic deal with bold lines and straightforward rules and sure, maybe it wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind, but at least he finally knew where they stood. At least they had a definition now. Plus, this was easily the most functional they'd ever been, so _no._

Memory Lane was closed.

Detour to Platonic Avenue.

A quiet little snort drew his eyes back up. She was staring out at the living room with a strange look in her eyes, chewing the inside of her cheek, and his brows drew in—was that a laugh? She caught his stare after a few seconds and sobered immediately, making his curiosity spike.

"What?"

She shrugged about as convincingly as she'd pretended to be pregnant. "What, what?"

"What's funny?"

"Why would something be funny?"

"You were just laughing."

"Oh, no, that was just—" she gestured vaguely at her face, "sniffling."

His brows ticked up.

"You know, like a… sinus thing."

He kept staring at her for a beat, brows hiked over his eyes, and she stared back like a cool, expressionless statue. Until she cracked.

"Okay, and maybe I," she swallowed a little awkwardly, averting her stare and waving a hand around the room, "maybe I was trying to come up with a safe part of the apartment to ask about and realized that I… couldn't." She pressed her lips together in a thin line and he blinked.

She looked caught between tension and laughter, like she could tip either way depending on how he responded, and it threw him—conversations about their physical relationship usually happened in accidental bursts, in eggshelly situations that they maneuvered around like clumsy acrobats. This direct and lighthearted of an address was… new. A beat passed in which he attempted to analyze the risky new territory of it all.

Then, "We kind of got around, didn't we?"

She burst out laughing, the sharp kind that sprang free after trying to keep itself in, and he felt his mouth slip into an instinctive curl.

"I was honestly," she waved a hand to try and stymie her laughter, "trying _so_ hard to come up with a place where nothing had happened and—"

He shook his head as she devolved into laughter. "Nothing."

" _Nothing_."

Her laugh was infectious and he felt it twitching at his lips. "Told you I was the class skank."

"Oh, God."

"You think covering a whole apartment in a few day is easy?" he demanded, smile widening as her laughter intensified. "It takes years of training."

"You were _not_ the class skank."

"I was!"

"And we didn't cover the whole apartment."

"What?"

"Bonnie's room." His indignant expression fell. "I didn't count it earlier because why would you have done something to her room to prank me, but now? Totally counts."

"I mean," he feigned a look at his watch, distantly aware of the fact that he should probably reroute this conversation, "we still have time."

She laughed. "No room left behind."

"Equal opportunity skanks."

"In that case, we'd have to hit the fire escape, too." His face flattened and she broke into a grin. "You know, your favorite place."

"Veto."

"It could be therapeutic—replace your bad memories of heights with good ones."

"Nothing is good enough to make me forget about how much I hate heights."

"I am."

His stare flicked up to hers. Her eyes were competitive and glinting, laughter poised on the curl of her mouth, and even though he knew she was joking, he felt the teasing atmosphere of the room shift a little. He'd thought making fun of their past could make light of the heaviness, turn the tension into humor, but now here he was, pinioned into place by the thought of her pulling out all the stops to make him forget about his fear of heights.

His throat thickened at the mental images burning through his head.

He'd probably forget his own name.

 _And you'd remember it afterwards when everything's a giant, confusing mess again_ , the rational part of his brain spat out, breaking him out of his paralysis.

"I, uh—" he cleared his throat, glancing down at the folder in his hand—he needed to get his head somewhere else, "I think I'm going to take a break from work. Maybe catch up on some shows."

She nodded at the TV. "We have Netflix all set up, if you want."

"Oh, I don't want to distract you, I can just use the laptop."

"I can work through an earthquake, Stefan—you won't distract me."

He frowned. "You sure?"

She grabbed the remote and held it out to him, and he hesitated for a beat before taking it from her.

He scrolled through the titles with a flick of his thumb. He wasn't even sure what he felt like watching, honestly, but whatever it was, he had to love it—his mind would wander if he didn't. The first thing that popped up on the 'Recently Watched' was an old season of Fear Factor and his eyes flattened—Bonnie'd made him sit through an entire six hour marathon of that once. She'd spent the whole time smacking his arm all 'are you seeing this!?' and gleefully shoving popcorn into her mouth while he struggled to remember why life was worth living.

He managed to max out three whole genres before he got to 'Fantasy and Adventure', where predictably, he ended up finding a winner.

It took Caroline a beat to comment.

"Are you kidding me?"

He frowned as the credits bloomed over the screen. "What?"

Her voice was half-laughter. "Stefan."

"What? _"_

 _"The Princess Bride_?"

His brow furrowed. "You say that like it's not a critically acclaimed masterpiece." He felt her staring at his profile and turned to look at her, lips twitching. " _What_?"

"Who are you?"

"Who are _you_? Everyone loves The Princess Bride."

"No, they don't."

"Yes, they do—it's one of the greatest movies of all time."

"It's like a thousand years old."

"It's from 1987."

"And it's about a princess."

"No, it's about friendship and heroism and redemption—"

"And a princess," she repeated, and he scoffed in dismissal.

"Have you ever even seen it?"

"Yeah, when I was like five," she snorted, and he gestured at her with the remote.

"See? That's the problem, you don't remember it—you need to watch it again."

"I am _not_ watching it."

"Come on."

"No."

"You even remind me of one of the characters."

"What?" He knew that'd catch her interest. "Which one?"

"You'll have to watch it."

"I'm not going to watch it."

"Then you'll never know."

He turned back to the movie with a frank look, mouth tipping into a smirk, and he felt her eyeing him from the couch again. An assessing beat passed, and then:

"You're Lawyer Dangerous-ing me, aren't you?"

He snorted at the term, stare flicking back to hers. "What?"

"You're pretending I remind you of a character so that I'll watch a little bit to find out who and then get sucked in and watch the whole thing."

"Wow, I ruined you."

"Am I right?"

"No, you really do remind me of someone, but that's a great example of Lawyer… what was it?"

"Dangerous-ing."

"Right."

The movie's narration began, drawing his gaze back to the screen, and she pretended to busy herself with her work. He could tell she was listening, though. Every few seconds she'd glance up for a fleeting beat before focusing back on her laptop.

He didn't blame her—the opening sequence was one of his favorite parts of the movie. The bored boy who had no idea what an adventure he was about to go on, the sly grandfather who knew he'd have him hooked in seconds, the introduction of Westley and Buttercup, the sweeping shots of the golden fields, the fun, winking humor of it all.

"Is this supposed to be a satire?" Caroline asked after a few lines.

"It transcends genre." She shot a flat look at his profile and his lips twitched. "But yeah, it does have satirical elements."

The movie promptly shifted the focus onto Princess Buttercup, describing the way she was beautiful and bossy and delighted in tormenting farm boy Westley, and he snuck another glance at Caroline. She was openly watching now.

"Remember that character I said you reminded me of?" he ventured, and she pursed her lips, amused. The movie suddenly shifted back to the bored boy grimacing and saying he hated love stories. "That's him."

Caroline blinked at the screen and then burst out laughing. His brow furrowed, feigning confusion despite the grin tugging at his mouth.

"What? Did you think you were someone else?"

"Shut up," she laughed, and his smile widened.

"You didn't think you were Buttercup, did you?" She rolled her eyes and he feigned a wince. "That's embarrassing."

"What kind of name is Buttercup, anyway?"

"Uh, a great one?"

"And how are they already in love?" she scoffed. "We're like three seconds into the movie."

"There was a time-lapse."

"Ugh, montage love," she muttered, and he he lifted a hand in a halting gesture.

"You are not about to disparage one of the greatest love stories of all time."

She choked on a laugh. "Of _all time_?"

"Westley and Buttercup are legendary."

"I don't see it."

" _What_? He reinvents his whole identity to come back to her."

"So does Gatsby—that doesn't make him and Daisy a great love story."

"He doesn't do it to impress her, he does it to save her," he countered, waving at the screen. "He becomes everything he needs to be in order to get to her. He outsmarts and outfights and outmaneuvers anyone that gets in his way."

"Sounds like he gets an adventure and she gets to sit around and wait for him."

"No dice—she's just as big of a badass as he is."

She pursed her lips, stare glittering with amusement at how into it all he was. "I still don't see it." His hands lifted in disbelief and she scoffed. "It's too fast, too unrealistic—I don't buy that they're in love."

"They grew up together! They have their own secret way of saying I love you," he exclaimed, unable to believe what he was hearing, and she couldn't help but laugh at his expression. "Didn't you hear the whole 'as you wish' monologue? How much more romantic can it get than telling someone you love them in words only they could ever understand?"

"What if the words were like 'overzealous rectal exam', would you still think it's romantic?"

"You know what? _Yes."_

 _"Overzealous rectal exam_?"

"Overzealous rectal exam," he confirmed, "because I'd know that underneath that frankly disgusting imagery—like honestly, what's wrong with you?—there's an 'I love you' meant just for me."

"Do you actually believe in all that, though?" she managed between laughs, and his face crumpled.

"Love?"

"Not just love, _that_ love—storybook love," she explained, eyes bright with irony. "Sweeping, grand gesture, travel-to-the-ends-of-the-earth, speak-our-own-weird-language love."

He parted his mouth in an instinctive 'yes' but it caught in his throat.

He blinked for a second.

…did he?

He felt his stubbornly impassioned expression dim, slipping into something stiller. Cooler. He definitely used to. He'd grown up with it. Thought his parents had it. Thought Freya and Marcel had it. Thought he'd one day have it. Even when he was with Valerie and knew it wasn't quite right, he never questioned that it was out there, that lightning bolt, waiting for the right moment, for the right person, to strike.

And then he met Elena.

And all he could remember thinking was that for all his lofty, unrealistic romanticizations of love, he actually hadn't idealized it enough.

It was better.

She was better.

Overwhelming. Luminous. He'd felt like a stray planet that had gotten caught in her orbit and knew with fundamental, infinite certainty that he was exactly where he was supposed to end up. He'd found his sun.

"I, uh," he began, glancing down at his hands, lips flickering half-heartedly, "I don't know anymore, actually."

Was it real if the sun started to fade after a few years? Was it real if the gravity weakened and he had to struggle to stay in her atmosphere? Was it real if another planet got pulled in, too, one he could never see because it was always on the exact opposite side of her, moving in tandem with him, eclipsed by her glow?

Was it real if it turned out she wasn't the sun at all?

Just a lonely grey moon reflecting the light he was basking her in?

Was it fair that he'd ever expected her to be?

"But you used to."

It took him a second to meet Caroline's stare. It was quieter, the laughter having mostly faded from it, and he realized she probably knew he was thinking about Elena. Just like he knew when she was thinking about Matt. Just like they both knew when they didn't want to talk about either one.

They'd almost gone there earlier, right before the power came back on. He'd taken a chance and asked about Matt and even though she was trying, he could tell it was the last thing she wanted to talk about. And he couldn't blame her, really, because the last thing he wanted to do right now was talk about Elena.

"Anyway," he said, pushing a hand through his hair and attempting to buoy the mood, "realistic or not, Buttercup and Westley are timeless and you'll come around eventually."

Her smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "We'll see."

He plucked up the remote and shut the TV off, not really in the mood for epic romance anymore, and he felt her probing stare watching him so he changed the subject. "Wonder how this dinner date's going."

"God, I know." She glanced over her shoulder to the wall between the two apartments. "It's been really quiet over there."

"Think we should check in?"

She scrunched her nose. "Probably not. Bonnie's been texting me updates—she said everything was fine like ten minutes ago."

"Good."

"Plus, she's got Damon with her." He felt a low flare of guilt at the name. "He'll keep her safe. I mean, he'll probably annoy her half to death in the process, but she'll be fine."

"Right." He dropped his gaze to his hands, staring at them for a beat before clearing his throat. "I actually kind of went off on him this afternoon."

She frowned. "Damon?"

"Yeah."

"About what?"

He sighed, dragging his gaze back up to hers. "Mix of things. Bonnie, mainly."

Her brow furrowed. "Bonnie as in the girl he spent all night taking care of?"

"Yep."

"And is currently taking care of?"

"That's the one."

"What'd you say?"

"I might've… sort of…" he reached up and rubbed the back of his neck, "accused him of taking advantage of her."

Her brows flew up. "What?"

"I know."

"Why?" He cast around for an answer and her brows knitted. "Is it because of what I said this morning? The thing about the vibes?"

"No." He shook his head. "I mean, not really, I was just—I don't know, Bonnie was acting weird around him, and she kind of has a past with being taken advantage of when she's emotionally vulnerable, and I was in a pretty weird headspace over," he waved a hand, realizing he probably shouldn't get into his random bout of jealousy, "stuff, and I just took it all out on him."

"Yikes."

"I know."

"Did he get mad?"

"No," he chuckled, "which honestly made it worse because it was like he was just totally used to people thinking the worst of him."

She winced. "I mean, did you apologize?"

He scrubbed a hand over his face. "I honestly haven't really had the chance—between the dinner and the contract and everything going on between you and me, I just," he shook his head and she nodded.

"Right." She bit her lip. "Sorry about that." He glanced at her and she shrugged. "The you and me stuff, I mean. It was messy and time-consuming and honestly didn't even lead anywhere—"

"What? No, Caroline," he scoffed. "Not at all. That wasn't what I—I don't," he shook his head again, expression softening a bit as he averted his eyes, "I don't regret a second of that."

It was a stupid thing to say. He knew that. He could practically feel his brain slow-blinking at him like 'dude.' But it was true, and he wanted her to know that even knowing how everything worked out, or rather didn't work out, he was glad it happened. The dark parts. The bright parts. The heady parts. All of it. He felt her staring at him, so after a reluctant beat, he met her gaze.

He couldn't quite place her expression but it made the room hum.

She cleared her throat. "Well," she clapped her hands against her knees, "I'm sure if you tell Damon what you told me, you guys will be fine."

"Right." He shoved a hand in his hair. "Yeah, hopefully."

"And honestly, don't beat yourself up too much over it," she added, offering a small shrug. "We all mess up. I mean," she scoffed, "let's be real, if there was a Fuck Up Olympics going on in this apartment, you'd easily come in last."

He smiled ruefully. "Not sure about that."

"Oh, please."

His brows raised. "Caroline, I've taken like 65,000 wrong turns with you."

"I mean, yeah, but that's because I make no sense," she explained, waving at herself with a dark look of amusement. "I'm all U-turns and conflicting road signs—I'm like a human Bermuda Triangle."

He snorted despite himself. "No, you're not."

"Yeah, I am, but it's fine," she said, "because it just means I know from experience that it's really hard to stay mad at you." Her lips twitched. "Irrationally or otherwise. So you're good."

He smiled at her for a beat before dropping his gaze. "Maybe."

"Just give him the Disney Prince look."

He groaned. "I don't have a Disney Prince look."

"You have the Disney-est of Disney Prince looks."

"I really don't."

"Look at me."

He glanced up at her with an exasperated expression.

"Think of saving manatees."

His lips begrudgingly twitched and her face lit up.

"That's it, that's the look."

"This is just my face."

"Well then even better, you don't even have to try."

He lapsed into a chuckle, shaking his head at her persistence, and she grinned a sunny, silly little grin at him that fluttered through his veins. Christ, how had it taken him so long to notice this side of her?

"Well," he said after a beat, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, "deserved or not, I appreciate the vote of confidence."

"It's deserved."

He chuckled.

"You'll be his Steffy Bear again in no time."

"Thanks, Care." She reared back, brow furrowing into a surprised look, and his easy expression rumpled. "What?"

"Nothing, it's just—" she shook her head as if to clear it and he blinked.

"What?"

"I don't think you've ever called me Care before."

She looked puzzled, like she couldn't decide how she felt about it, and his brows drew in—had he just called her Care? He hadn't even realized. It'd just rolled off his tongue. "Oh." He blinked. "I mean. Is that okay, or?"

"Yeah, it's fine, just…" her shoulders eased up, "different." Her expression grew considering. "Though honestly, if we're really doing this friend thing, I guess we should get used to it. _Stef_."

His face scrunched. "Yikes."

"Right?"

"Super weird."

"Maybe we can ease into it."

"Sounds good."

"Mm."

"Can I make a request, though?"

"Sure."

"I just feel like 'Danger Zone' suits me a lot better—"

She let out a bright laugh that bounced against the walls of his head, filling it with warm, buoyant, fuzzy-edged light.

"Whatever, Piss Pants."

* * *

Bonnie knew the ball was in her court to be the bigger person.

She understood that.

She really did.

Damon was agitated. Uncomfortable. Defensive. And now, thanks to an oblivious Kai and a seemingly infinite supply of Johnnie Walker, a little drunk. And the thing was, she'd been there. She knew exactly how razing the feeling of being seen in a vulnerable state was—she could still feel echoes of the sharp instinct to push everyone away calcified in her veins, lingering from years ago, from last night, even.

But again, that just meant she knew how pointless it was. And it made it harder for her to have the same bottomless pit of patience Stefan had always had for her, because Jesus Christ, she just wanted to shake him and go 'I know what you're doing and it's stupid grow up'. Every comment, every self-sabotaging curl of his mouth, every smug little glitter his face got when he tried to sink a little lower—they all made her feel caught between telling him that everything was going to be okay and asking him if he wanted a gold fucking star.

Unfortunately, the latter seemed to be winning out.

"This dinner is amazing, Kai," she said, tipping her wine glass toward their loony host before taking a sip. The three of them were gathered around his magazine-worthy masterpiece of a dining table, Kai at the head, Damon on one side, Bonnie on the opposite, eating what was easily one of the best meals she'd ever had (even the swan, which Kai had somehow cooked in 20 minutes using his 'gamma ray oven', was buttery and incredible and made Bonnie feel like a horrible person).

But despite the crooning Christmas jazz and the twinkling lights and the merry little toy train zipping around the ceiling, the overall vibe of the table was tense. Prickly. The air was elastic with stiffness, a stretched rubber band eager to snap, and it was entirely the fault of Kai's petty, four-year-old guests. What'd started out as stiff comments and tense looks had flared into outright sparring in just half an hour, and now Bonnie and Damon could barely look at each other without snapping. It was snippy. Name-cally. Childish as hell. And they were both too stubborn to stop.

The good news was Kai hadn't noticed.

"Thanks!" he said in response to Bonnie's compliment, shoving an entire stuffed pepper into his mouth. "Cookingfz kinduva new hobby a'mine." He swallowed gracelessly. "I took it up yesterday."

"Wow," Bonnie said, spearing a bit of asparagus onto her fork. "Fast learner, huh?"

"Fastest in the tri-state area," he confirmed, unceremonious, as if he were confirming his birthday. "And probably the East coast, but I haven't run the stats yet 'cause I'm smarter than everyone I meet so who cares?" He rolled his eyes and stuffed a dinner roll down his throat in one jaw-unhinging bite.

"Must be depressing," Damon drawled, and the cynicism in his voice was enough to send a flare of annoyance skittering through her.

Kai frowned. "Depressing how?"

Damon waved a loose hand. "Don't worry about it." His plate was mostly untouched, his fingers drumming tightly against the Scotch glass they'd become permanently attached to throughout the dinner, and it drew her lips into a thin line.

"Why would I worry about it?"

Damon shot him an insouciant smile. "Just means it doesn't matter."

"Why would you say something that doesn't matter?"

"Because isn't that the human way?" he ventured in a whimsical slur.

Kai merely continued to stare at him, growing more confused by the second, and despite the voice telling her to be an adult and leave it be, she couldn't help a dry, "He means the world is already so dark and irredeemable and insert-Holden-Caulfield-quote-here that he can only imagine how depressing it is to see it through genius eyes." She waved her wine glass at Damon, arching an admittedly unnecessary brow. "Right?"

"If I say yes, will that satisfy your desperation to deal with everyone's problems but your own for the night?" She rolled her eyes as he gave Kai a blithe look. "Bonnie likes to feel needed—pretty sure it's an abandonment issues thing."

"And Damon likes to pretend he doesn't care about anything—pretty sure it's a grow-the-hell-up thing."

"'Grow up' says the delusional optimist."

"'Cynical comment' says the boring cynic."

"Rather be boring than naïve."

"Really?" she snorted, "because I thought being entertaining was like your whole schtick. Good for a laugh, good for a drink, good for an orgasm, not really good for anything else?"

"Multiple orgasms," he corrected, taking a simpering swig of his Scotch, and she missed the tightening of his jaw.

"Wow, so cool—isn't he so cool?" she asked Kai, dropping her chin in her palm, and Kai merely blinked.

"Uh—"

"Like is there anything cooler than not giving a shit about anything?"

"I don't know, I think taking your secret fear of being a bad person out on people who remind you of it is pretty high up on the cool scale."

Her skin flared with confusion—where the _hell_ had that come from? It was so out of left field that she just turned to stare at him.

"I mean, isn't that what you're doing?" he pressed, sitting up a bit straighter in his seat, face changing. "Isn't that _your_ whole schtick? The reformed bad girl who clings so hard to optimism because she's terrified the disaster she used to be is who she really is?"

Something unexpectedly sharp flickered down her spine, the words blurring into Enzo's voice, into Klaus's, into the kinds of things they used to tell her about herself.

"I mean, didn't you tell me last night that your biggest fear is that something's wrong with you and it's only a matter of time before everyone else figures it out? Takes off like your shitty parents did?" The blunt words hit her like a punch to the gut. "And now suddenly here you are, talking to me like I'm some kind of preteen going through a phase, like if I close my eyes and believe in fairies or whatever the hell it is you do, I can be different?"

He waved a blithe hand, questioning, as if waiting for an answer, and she felt her throat tightening with white-hot resentment. His easy expression grew hard.

"I'm not interested in being your proof-of-concept, kid. You want to believe that people can choose to be better so you can breathe easier, that's fine, believe away, show the world, knock 'em dead," he leaned forward against the table with a dark look, stare bright and a little galling, "but leave me the fuck out of it."

Her fingers had unknowingly curled into loose fists. Her head was caught in a hum as she tried to shake off the burn of hearing her biggest insecurity thrown in her face, casual, smug. She'd told him about that when she was shit-faced. Spiraling. An unguarded, defenseless mess. And he just brought it into some dinner spat like it was nothing, like it was the weather, like it wasn't something that'd scared the living hell out of her since she was five.

Distantly, beneath the blazing layer of resentment, she recognized that he was probably doing this on purpose. He was going for the things he thought affected her the most because they had the highest chance of pushing her away, and that meant that somewhere in all his smug bullshit, something about her was getting to him. He wouldn't sink so low if it wasn't.

But fuck if it wasn't low.

"You know why you know you know those things about me?" she finally managed after a beat, voice charged with restraint, and he arched a brow. "Because you were there for me last night. Because I was destructive and vulnerable and a friggin' _mess_ , and you stepped in and took the heat so Stefan and Caroline wouldn't have to."

He snorted and took a swig of his drink and she pressed on anyway.

"And as much as it probably sucked for you, we both know it sucked more for me. It _sucked_ to have to look at myself in the mirror this morning," she hissed, shaking her head. "It _sucked_ to have to look you in the eye and be okay with everything you saw. It sucked to have to come up with a way to even try to apologize for everything, but you know what didn't suck?" she asked, leaning forward, and he gave a mocking shrug.

"The fantasy sex?"

"You telling me that I had nothing to apologize for," she spat, ignoring the flippancy. "You said that you pushed, I snapped, shit happens, and left it at that. It made what would've otherwise been an unbearably shitty morning actually kind of okay, and it meant a lot to me, so when you started panicking in the wine cellar, I didn't see it as a chance to make you an experiment. I didn't see it as some opportunity for validation. I saw it as a chance to return the goddamn favor."

His stare finally flicked up to meet hers and she held it with a blistering gaze.

"I pushed, you snapped, _shit happens_ ," she echoed, voice charged. "And I was totally ready to leave it at that. I wasn't even going to bring it up if you didn't. _You_ were the one who couldn't let it go. _You_ were the one who turned it into a fight because you were so damn defensive you couldn't even handle me giving you a _Band-Aid_. And honestly, if you'd left it at that, whatever, but bringing up what I told you about my parents?" She gave him a searing look, nostrils flaring a bit. "Using that to give me some ulterior motive that we both know is bullshit? A little lower than I'm willing to put up with right now."

She tossed her napkin onto the table and pushed her chair back sharply, overcome with a sudden need to get out of this ridiculous farce of a date.

"What are you doing?" Kai asked, brow furrowing, and she shot him an apologetic look as she got to her feet.

"I'm sorry, Kai—everything was gorgeous and so, so delicious, but I think I just," she pushed a hand through her hair, a dull throb starting in her head, "I need to head back a little early, you know? Unwind a bit before bed."

"But we're not done," he said, stare widening, growing alarmed, and she offered a guilty smile.

"I know, I just—"

"There's tiramisu and jell-O and crème-bru-yay and… and…" he waved an anxious hand around and she felt her heart leaden a bit.

"I know, and it looks _so_ amazing, but I really need to—"

"I made sixty-five different kinds of sprinkles."

He was getting a little panicky, fingers tightening against the tablecloth, and she lifted a hand toward him. "Hey, it's oka—"

"I grew the truffles I used for the brownies using a food computer. I set the microbiome to the best harvesting year in Argentina."

Her face crumpled as he began shaking his head. "Kai—"

"Would it kill you to stay for one dessert?" Damon muttered from his seat, and a flare of heat flashed through her as her stare snapped over to his.

"It might kill you."

"This punishes him, not me."

Her eyes thinned. "Oh, do not even try to—"

She jumped when Kai suddenly flew to his feet, body bumping into the table and nearly knocking over the wine glasses. He whirled around and walked out of the dining room without a word, body rigid, and a beat of silence trailed him before she felt Damon's eyes on her. Pointed. Direct. Her jaw clenched.

"This is on you," she growled.

"Am I the one walking out?"

"You're the reason I'm walking out," she bit back, spinning on her heel and making her way over to the living room, and she heard him rustling to his feet behind her.

"Bon."

It was a sigh that made her shoulders tighten as she walked. "Don't 'Bon' me—my friends call me Bon, I'm not 'Bon' to you."

"I didn't—" she could hear him catching up so she sped up. "Look, I wasn't—" he sighed sharply as she tried to swing the door shut behind her, likely in his face, "Jesus, kid, would you just listen to me for a second?"

He caught her wrist and she whirled around with a harassed look. "Don't 'kid' me either. 'Kid' was when you were a _tolerable_ asshole. 'Kid' was when you didn't throw my vulnerabilities in my face over a hissy fit."

His stare grew a little defensive. "Like you weren't throwing any of mine?"

She threw a hand up. "I don't even know what your vulnerabilities are, Damon! All I know about you is that you sent the parents you hated to jail and you had a shitty time in foster care and none of those things seem to bother you that much because, and I quote, ' _I don't care about anything!'_ " She waved her hands around sarcastically. "You even said your panic attacks don't bother you, so _no_ , I wasn't throwing your vulnerabili—"

His arm suddenly pushed her behind him and she had to grab onto his shoulder to stay upright, nearly losing her balance from the momentum shift.

"What the _hell_ are yo—"

The words died on her tongue at sight of Kai holding a crossbow about three feet away from them, one eye closed, the other one narrowed, the lethally sharp arrow pointed directly at Damon's chest. "Hi, friends," he said, cool, unfazed, his panic from earlier entirely gone, and she felt her entire body go cold with alarm.

Fuck.

 _Fuck._

This was it. This was what they'd all been worried about, what they'd gotten too sucked up in their stupid drama to remember to look out for. Kai wasn't just some merry little loon. He was a serial killer. _He was a friggin' serial killer and they'd played_ _right into his game Jesus fucking Christ they were all going to di—_

"So here's the thing," Kai said, voice eerily emotionless, like he was a totally different person, "I don't handle tense situations well. Like they stress the crap out of me, and you two are being neeeeext level stressful, so…" he shrugged, "how about we all sit down, stop fighting, and enjoy a nice assortment of fastidiously prepared desserts in the smoking den?"

Damon's back was still against her, and despite how mad at him she was, she was begrudgingly thankful to have him there in that moment.

Kai blinked at the silence. "Or I can just impale you."

Bonnie jumped in with a blinding smile from over his shoulder. "Dessert sounds great!"

Damon's head knocked back to look at her. "What?"

"Just do what he says," she hissed back, and his face crumpled.

"Are you kidding me?"

"Do I look like I'm kidding?"

"Great," Kai said with a predatory smile, and they both glanced back over at him—the crossbow was still firmly pointed in their direction. He nodded his head toward the next room. "Why don't you two just make your way over to the—"

"I'm sorry, but what the everloving _fuck_ , dude?"

Her eyes snapped shut in horror at the sound of Damon's voice. This goddamn _moron._ "Damon."

"No, this is absurd—why the hell are you aiming a crossbow at us?" he pressed on, and yep. This was it. This was how they died. "You don't get your way for one second and you threaten peoples _lives_? Seriously?"

" _Damon_."

"That's fucked up, man. You've been pretty cool all night—"

Good fucking God, she was going to die over Damon's impulse to bro out with a serial killer.

"—a little weird, sure, but pretty surprisingly cool, and then Bonnie doesn't want dessert and suddenly you're threatening to impale us?" He lifted a hand that Bonnie was ninety-five percent sure was about to have an arrow through it. "What the hell?"

She waited for the whoosh. The yell. The blood. The end.

But nothing happened.

Three seconds.

Ten seconds.

Silence.

Slowly, warily, she opened her eyes and forced herself to look over Damon's shoulder, and to her surprise, Kai's grip on the crossbow had loosened. His brazen stance had reverted back to a wiry, awkward collection of limbs. He looked fidgety. Vintage Kai.

"Sorry," he offered after a few more seconds, and to her shock, he lowered the crossbow to the ground, stare dropping to his shuffling feet. "This is just… usually the only way I can get people to listen to me."

Shock suffused her in a slow, dull wave.

What.

Damon took a step forward and she had to fight the impulse to pull him back. "Not a good look, man."

"I know," he mumbled, like a little kid being reprimanded, and Damon eased the crossbow out of his hands without any kind of resistance.

"I mean, I get it," he pressed on, holding the crossbow out behind him, and it took her a second to figure out he wanted her to take it, "it sucks when people don't pay attention to you. Like totally sucks. People used to ignore the shit out of me growing up, and I'm sorry we just did it to you, but getting all murdery like that? Not the way to go."

She grabbed the crossbow and slowly began walking back to the dining room table, keeping her eyes on them the whole time. She wasn't super sure what Damon was doing, but it seemed to be working.

"People ignored me a lot growing up, too," Kai mumbled, and Damon arched a brow.

"Parents?" He nodded loosely, and Damon called out over his shoulder, "Hey Bon, we've got another one. Shitty parents club, party of three."

Kai smiled awkwardly. "I can't really imagine anyone ignoring you guys."

Damon snorted. "One of my foster families literally thought I was named Dan for the entire six months I lived with them."

Kai's eyes brightened a little bit, and Bonnie couldn't help but stop to watch them. "Really?"

"Swear to God, dude."

"You don't look like a Dan."

"Thanks."

"Maybe a Dante."

Damon's face rumpled. "I don't know how I feel about that."

"Did you know the _Inferno_ Dante was a pharmacist but he only did it so he could run for political office and then he was exiled from Florence for life and never ended up running so he basically learned pharmacy for no reason?"

"I didn't know that, no."

"Yeah," Kai said, dropping his gaze. "Then he died of malaria."

Damon's lips twitched. "Bummer."

"Did you mean what you said earlier?" It was a shy pivot, a little vulnerable, and Bonnie felt the apprehension melting from her body at an alarmingly sappy rate. "About the whole… thinking I was cool thing?"

Damon just blinked at him for a second. "Dude, you own a _functional light saber_." Kai's lips curled up a bit. "Your shower doubles as an anti-gravity chamber." The smile spread further, and Damon lapsed into a scoff. "Like are you kidding me? You're one of the coolest people I know."

A flush rose up Kai's neck, dotting the tips of his ears pink, and his grin ended up spreading so wide that it threatened to eat his face off. "I have phaser guns, too."

"Really?"

"You want to see them?"

"Sure."

He yanked him by the arm and Damon staggered forward, caught off-guard. "Oh, you mean now, I— _ow, fuck—_ okay!"

He stumbled behind him as Kai eagerly pulled him across the room, face a little harassed, and as just as they passed, Damon's stare slipped up and caught hers for a brief, unexpected beat.

She wasn't sure what he saw. He looked caught under her gaze—boyish, almost, like he was some angsty teen she'd walked in on listening to Britney Spears—and when he averted his stare, it wasn't with his usual cool indifference. It was… reluctant, like he couldn't quite bring himself to meet her eyes.

Her blood was humming with an infuriating layer of endearment. Damon Whatever, the blithe asshole who 'didn't care about anyone but himself', had just out-Hufflepuffed the hell out of her. He'd given Kai the benefit of being treated like a friend for maybe the first time in his loopy little life.

And maybe he had a right to be a little mad at her.

Maybe he was onto something with the whole trying-to-make-him-believe-in-himself thing.

Because as she watched a flouncing Kai drag him into his laboratory, all begrudging and stiff and surprisingly well-intentioned, all she could think was ' _you are so much more than you think you are, you piece of shit'_.

* * *

"Get away from that, what are you—"

 _Whack._

"Don't you _dare_ touch my—"

 _Thump._

 _"Bitch,_ that is a _seventy dollar_ —"

 _Crash._

Caroline stared at the cat perched on her vanity with the thin-lipped, wild-eyed look of the soon-to-be homicidal. Her color-coded nail polishes were scattered across the tabletop. Her strategically organized makeup brushes were all over the floor. Her brand new YSL bronzer was cracked into pieces in her white shag rug.

She gathered her hand into a slow fist in an attempt to gather her cool. "Are you trying to die? Is that it?"

The cat blinked at her.

"Because I won't make it quick."

She blinked again.

"I'll make sure you suffer."

The cat stared at her for a long beat, as if considering the threat, before lifting her paw up and licking it casually.

Caroline felt her blood pressure spike. " _Stefan_!" She blustered out of her room with a scowl, padding down the hallway in Bonnie's too-small Gryffindor slippers. "This cat is a terrorist!"

Two minutes. She'd gone to her room for _two_ minutes to get her charger and destructo-cat just had to follow her and wreck an hour's worth of organization. _And_ her bronzer. _And_ her rug. She was probably shredding her down comforter right now.

"Stefan, I need you to get that wrecking ball out of my—"

"Hold on a sec, Beks," Stefan said before twisting around on the couch to look at her, and she realized he had his phone against his chest. "What's up?"

"Oh." Surprised quelled her rage. "Sorry, I didn't know you were talking to someone."

"It's fine, it's just my little sister." A flare of noise from the other end made his eyes light with exasperation. "Sorry—my very important, very top priority, very _loud_ little sister." He put the phone back up to his ear. "Better?"

He lapsed into a chuckle at the response, and she couldn't help but feel a little thrown by the exchange. She realized she'd never actually seen him interact with any of his sisters before.

"What did you need?" he asked after a beat, and she hesitated.

"Oh, just," she glanced back at her room, pressing her lips together—was it really worth interrupting a family call? "You know what, you're on the phone, it can wait."

"You sure?"

No.

"Yeah, it's fine."

"Alright," he said, eyeing her like he wasn't sure he believed her. 'I'll try to make this quick,' he mouthed so that his sister couldn't hear, and she waved him off as she sunk into the armchair, glancing again at her room.

If that she-devil scratched her wood floors she was going to feed her to Kai.

"Beks."

The harassed tone drew her gaze back over.

"Bekah, slow down, I can't—" he lapsed into a tired sigh, scrubbing a hand over his face before curling it around his chin, propping it up. His eyes flickered up to hers with a resigned look. 'Maybe not,' he mouthed.

She shot him a commiserating smile before reaching for her laptop, resigning herself to the fact that her room was probably going to be a war-zone by the time he finished. Friggin' demon. Oh, well. At least the reorganizing would give her something to do while she was stuck here.

She sighed as she settled back into her powerpoint, not wanting to seem like she was eavesdropping on the conversation happening in front of her. She was a little surprised he hadn't moved, honestly—she'd thought he might take the call elsewhere for a little privacy—but he just remained on the couch, body pitched forward, elbows propped against his knees as he rubbed his jaw with one hand and held the phone with the other.

Unintentionally, she found herself watching him. His thick brows were drawn inward, eyes tapered into a listening gaze, the kind that vaguely ping-ponged from spot to spot without really focusing on anything in front of it. He looked serious, and for a second she wondered if everything was okay.

And then he sighed, knuckles slipping off his chin. "Remind me why him texting back 'lol' means he's with Bethany, again?" Something appeared to be snapped back in response because he lifted a surrendering hand. "Right, Tiffany, sorry."

Caroline felt her lips slowly tugging upward, kindling, disbelieving. His sister had called him to bitch about drama. College-y, immature drama, if that snippet had been anything to go off. She felt a tide of amusement rising inside her, at the idea that of all the people she knew, Stefan was probably the _least_ suited to be a teen social guru, but it had an undercurrent of something warmer, too.

A wash of endearment.

Because judging by his reaction, this happened pretty often, and judging by the lack of lull on the other line, his sister felt pretty confident that he'd sit through every word of it, and judging by the fact that they had two other sisters but she chose to call Stefan instead, he was probably the only one who would, and if that wasn't the most annoyingly Stefan thing ever, she didn't know what was.

The wry curve of her mouth softened. He was tapping an absent thumb against his lips, eyes thinned into a ruminative peer, seemingly taking the story being told to him genuinely seriously, and on an impulse she knew wasn't smart at all, she wondered what it was like to have that. The certainty of him waiting at the finish line of a bad day. The reliability of his voice on the other end of the line, patient, sincere, calmly parsing through the bluster to try and understand what was wrong.

Bonnie had always said he'd been something of a rock for her growing up, but it wasn't until recently that Caroline really understood it—not only because of the things she'd learned about Bonnie, but because of the things she'd learned about him. Like the murmuring timbre his voice took on when he was trying to talk you down. Or how effective the steady hum of his heartbeat was as a metronome for racing thoughts. Or the uncanny way that every taut, carved out line of him somehow gave whenever he took you into his arms, molding to you, swathing, a boneless blanket of warmth.

Before this week, she used to cast off his whole 'savior best friend' role as just another self-righteous thing about him—Saint Stefan, the perpetual 'aw shucks' hero, swooping in to humble brag and save the day. Now, though, knowing what she knew about Bonnie's life, that felt so petty. She was grateful as hell that Bonnie had had him to lean on growing up. She couldn't imagine how things would've turned out if she hadn't.

As if sensing her thoughts, his stare flicked up to hers, and it promptly took on a bemused flicker at the attention. Likely because she'd propped her chin against her hand and had been straight up staring at him for the past two minutes. She straightened up hastily and slipped her hand through hair, trying to play it off as nothing, and the corner of his mouth took on a puzzled tug of amusement at the twitchiness of the reaction.

Thankfully, it only took two seconds for it to dive back into a frown, stare averting. "This is still Bethany we're talking about, or—" a sigh cut him off. "Tiffany, sorry, Tiffany."

She reverted her stare to her laptop screen, annoyed that enough time had gone by for it have switched to her screensaver. So much for not wanting to seem like she was eavesdropping.

"Well, honestly, I think you're making a lot assumptions that could be avoided by just having an honest conversation, Bekah. Talk to him. Ask him where you guys are at."

She sized up one of the figures on her slides by a few pixels.

"I don't understand why you keep bringing up Tiffany. Isn't Greg the issue here?"

She scrunched her nose and sized it back down.

"No, I get that you think she's after him to spite you, but I—" he sighed at what sounded like an impassioned interruption. "Right." Another beat. "I get that, I do, I'm just," he waved a hand, "I guess what I'm trying to say is that it sounds like you need to figure this out with Greg, not her. You say you really like him—talk to him. Spend some time together. Dazzle him with that Rebekah charm. And if he's not the world's biggest idiot, trust me, he won't even remember Bethany exists."

Her lips couldn't help but twitch at the slip-up.

"Right, Tiffany, sorry—see? Even I can't remember her."

Another beat passed, and he groaned.

"Beks."

She glanced up from her laptop—he'd knocked his head back against the couch.

"Mm-hmm," he said miserably.

His eyes were closed, hand coming up to run itself over his features, and she couldn't help but snort at his general aura of brotherly torment. The sound drew his gaze over to hers and rather than look away this time, she just smirked.

'Help,' he mouthed.

She shook her head with a shrug and his brow promptly furrowed. "How are we back to talking about Tiffany again?" A flare of noise replied and he lifted an exasperated hand. "Right, but this isn't about Tiffany."

Caroline's face drew into a skeptical look and he caught it, brows knitting.

She cleared her expression and dropped her gaze to her laptop.

He eyed her for a second before glancing away, listening for a long, silent stretch. "Again, though, what's the real goal here? Greg."

Caroline's face rumpled again and his gaze snagged on hers. He frowned and covered the receiver with his hand. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, dropping her stare back to her screen again, and she could feel him watching her for a few seconds.

"Beks, I'm going to put someone else on the phone for a second."

Caroline's head snapped up—what?

"She's good with this kind of stuff," he continued, eyes taking on a glint as he pushed himself up to his feet, "and she clearly has some different opinions from me."

"What? Stefan," she hissed, shaking her head as he closed the distance between them. "What the hell are you—"

"Here she is." He held out the phone with a smile and Caroline stared at it with a bewildered look.

"No."

"Please."

" _No,_ I don't even—"

"Caroline," he said, voice taking on a pleading note, and she made the stupid mistake of glancing up at his face. It was friggin' puppy-eyed. Humorous and a little sly, sure, but puppy-eyed all the same. He was Disney facing her.

 _Demon._

Demons everywhere.

She took the phone with a dark sigh, stare fixed on his. 'You owe me for this,' she mouthed, and he smiled that honey smile of his.

Ugh.

"Uh, _hello_?" an impatient voice said through the receiver, a little sharper than she'd expected it to be, and Caroline sat back against the armchair with a resigned look.

"Yeah, hi, sorry," she said, pushing a hand through her hair. She couldn't believe she was doing this. "It's Rebekah, right?"

"Right, and who the hell are you?"

She frowned at the bite. "Caroline. I'm…" what was she exactly? Stefan's friend? Stefan's fellow blizzard hostage? "…Bonnie's roommate."

"Fascinating, and I'm talking to you because?"

Caroline shot a flat glare up at Stefan, who'd resettled onto the couch with his case files all too happily. "Honestly, I have no idea." He glanced up and shot her a pouty look that made her lips twitch—God, he was annoying. "Your brother seems to think it's a good idea."

"Well," Rebekah sighed, "in the interest of saving time, why don't just say whatever hokey thing it is you were going to say so I can pretend to find it valuable and we can all move on?"

Her brows ticked up, stare averting from Stefan's.

"I mean," she pressed on in the tone of someone inspecting their perfectly manicured nails, "I understand you're probably drowning in free time, given the fact that you have nothing better to do than eavesdrop on my brother's phone calls, but some of us are actually quite busy, so go on," she chirped. "Do your thing. Give me the sisterhood spiel or whatever Hallmark collection it was you were planning on plagiarizing."

Caroline felt the corners of her lips tick upward, stare taking on a keen glitter.

"I'm sorry, did you need an official signal to start?" Rebekah asked, bitingly sarcastic. "Should I count down for you? Sound a fogho—"

"Greg's a textbook fuckboy and you clearly don't give a shit about him," Caroline announced without prelude, causing Rebekah's voice to peter off and Stefan's head to snap up in confusion. She shrugged at him as if to say, 'you wanted this, you're getting it'. "And you shouldn't," Caroline continued, sliding down a bit against the seatback and getting more comfortable, "because he's either an idiot who doesn't realize he's being used as a pawn in a war, or he doesn't care because he's only there to get laid."

Stefan winced at the visual and Caroline's lip quirked.

Yeah, buddy.

She could be a demon, too.

"Now the good news is, none of that hurts you because unlike what your Boy Scout of a brother seems to think, this isn't about Greg. This isn't even about romance. This is about you and Tiffany and the rivalry I'm assuming has been going on between you two for a while now, right?" Silence came from the other end, and she took that as her opportunity to needle deeper. "Before Greg, it was probably Steve? And before that, it was who gets captain of the swim team? And before that, who gets elected for class council?"

Rebekah heaved a quiet, begrudging sigh. "Maybe something like that."

"I know," Caroline said plainly, shrugging against the chair. "I know because I've been you, and I've had a Tiffany, and I had to learn the hard way that you don't win against Tiffanys with little battles. You don't win with Gregs and Steves and captain spots and elections. You know how you win?"

Stefan was staring at her with an apprehensive look, eyes glinting with a mixture of humor and 'what have I done?'.

"How?" Rebekah asked.

"You stop caring about it."

His brows drew in, surprised by the answer, and she shrugged.

"You stop living for her and you start living for yourself. You find things you genuinely care about and do them instead. You date people you actually like. You make friends that crack you up. You pursue your passions. You have fun. And that way, when you're older and wiser and look back on your time in college, you'll see a bunch of years you spent having a blast and learning new things about yourself instead of a bunch of years you wasted trying to one-up someone whose name you can't even remember."

His mouth curled into a faint smile.

"But more importantly," she added, "Tiffany will be social media stalking you every inch of the way, seething with jealousy, so take a lot of pictures."

He lapsed into a chuckle and she smirked—she had to keep it real, after all.

Rebekah was silent on the other end of the line, seemingly processing the words. A long beat went by, so quiet Caroline was almost convinced she'd hung up, until her voice suddenly surged back, spunkier, curious.

"Can I actually run another situation by you?"

Caroline blinked for a second before sighing, setting her laptop down on the coffee table, and curling her legs under her. "I'm going to need some tea," she told Stefan over the receiver with an annoyed look, and his lips flickered up as her stared at her.

"Sure."

He held the look for an oddly warm second before he got up and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving her to settle back more comfortably into the chair. She gave a battle-ready flip of her hair. "Alright, shoot."

She grimaced after a few seconds.

"Girl, he has roman numerals in his name— _next._ "

* * *

For most people, regret was a hindsight kind of thing.

They got mad, they blew up, they settled for a bit, and then, in the quiet, spacious aftermath of it all, rationality could slowly slip back into their heads. Take its rightful place at the helm. Reframe things for them with growing clarity till they murmured out a 'fuck' of realization.

That wasn't really Damon's experience.

He felt the regret real-time. Sharp and piercing. Every word a little stab to the lungs, a deliberate plunge of the shovel he was using to dig himself into a hole and isolate from the world as quickly as possible. Sometimes it wasn't even real-time: he'd know before he'd even opened his mouth that he was going to hate what came out.

But generally that meant the other person was going to hate it, too.

And rather than a consequence of his actions, for him that was the goal. Because people who hated you left you alone.

Left you to sit in the dirt where it was cool and quiet.

Unfortunately, the hole he'd just managed to dig himself into had an echo, and the only sound in it was the disbelieving crack in Bonnie's voice when she'd confronted him about bringing up her parents. Loud. Reverberating. Building on itself till it was the only thing he could hear.

Why the hell had he even gone there? He could've just told her he needed space. She was pushy but she wasn't careless—she would've backed off if he'd really asked her to, but no. No, instead he did the exact opposite. He parried and poked and baited, as if to prove that he could, that he was totally fine, that nothing was getting to him and she was wasting her time, and Christ, how stupid was that? What did that even accomplish? It just made her pokes harder and her targets deeper until suddenly he was saying something shitty enough to shut the whole thing down in one blow.

Something that wasn't even true, because she'd been right about that—it _was_ a bullshit accusation and they _did_ both know it. Bonnie wasn't some secretly bad person. She had some shadows, sure, and he may have wondered just how genuine her do-gooder streak was a few times, but if he'd learned anything about human nature from the absurd amount of places and people he'd lived with, it was that you only ever saw who someone really was in two scenarios: a crisis and when no one else was looking.

And his panic attack had been both. There was no audience. No peanut gallery to watch and give her brownie points for empathy. She was just running on instinct and her instincts were brave. Kind. She wanted—no, she needed—to help, and that told him a hell of a lot more about her than one drunken night did.

He let out a dark sigh, scrubbing a hand over his spaced-out features and glancing up. Him and Kai were still holed up in his little doomsday lab, having gotten halfway through an admittedly awesome phaser gun demonstration before one of them malfunctioned and nearly blew off his hand. Kai was in the middle of working out the kink, brow furrowed and tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, and for a second, Damon's dark mood unexpectedly lightened a bit.

Tyler used to make the same face when he was setting up his action figures. He'd get all wrapped up in the story and take the made up mythology way too seriously and even though he'd literally beg Damon to play with him, he always ended up ignoring him. Got lost in his own adventurous kid world.

It was weird, but murdery inclinations aside, Kai had a similar innocence about him.

"You should talk to her."

The words broke Damon out of his daze. "What?"

Kai glanced up from his punctilious soldering and blinked at him, eyes comically giant in his magnifying goggles. "Bonnie. She's mad at you. Or at least I think she is. I suck at people so I could be wrong."

Damon glanced over his shoulder toward the kitchen, where he could see the flicker of her slight frame tidying up. Even from a distance, he could tell her shoulders were tense. "No, I uh," he pressed his lips into a stiff smile, "I'm pretty sure you're right about that one."

"Then you should fix it."

He glanced back over to Kai. He sounded so pleasantly certain, like it was this easy, straightforward thing with no chance for failure, and Damon wondered what it'd be like to see the world through his eyes. "Fixing things isn't really my strong suit, bud."

Kai frowned as he leaned over a wire to inspect it. "You helped me fix my circuit board."

"Right, yeah, I mean more like," he waved a hand, "fixing things with people. Emotional fixes. Not my thing."

Kai scrunched his nose. "Troof. People are hard."

"That they are."

"With technology, it's straightforward," he offered. "You short the capacitor, you fix it. You crack the piston, you patch it. With people, it's all stupid intangibles like thoughts and feelings and you just," he blew a loud puff of air between his lips, waving his soldering gun around, "can't really know what you broke."

"Eh." Damon's stare drifted back over to Bonnie. "Pretty sure I know what I broke this time."

"Then go fix it."

"Again," Damon snorted, "not that easy."

"Why?" he pressed, eyes crossing as he focused on a tiny microchip. "You know what you did wrong, right?"

He blinked. "I mean, yeah, I just—"

"Then go tell her it was wrong."

"Pretty sure she knows that."

"Yeah, but does she know that you know that?"

The pre-formed rebuttal caught on his tongue, brows suspending in something between an arch and a furrow over his eyes. Did she know that? He assumed she did. Like, she had to—she'd basically spelled out all the ways it was wrong right to his face. He'd have to be a megadouche to not have listened to any of it.

But maybe she thought he was a megadouche.

Maybe she was waiting for him to prove that he wasn't.

A brief silence stretched between them before Kai spoke up, bug eyes fixed on a chip he was holding up with magnetic tweezers. "Yoda'd."

Damon snorted. "I don't know, bud."

"Just try."

"I don't think it's going to make a—"

"Don't think, just do."

His lips twitched at the impatience in his voice. There was no room for argument. He wasn't even looking at him, totally engrossed in his tinkering, but his opinion was fixed. "You're better at people than you think, you know that?"

"I'm good at logic," Kai corrected, setting the chip down and picking up another one to squint at it. "When people follow logical patterns, I'm good at them. When they don't, I kind of just want to blow them up. Speaking of," he set the tweezers down with a sudden bright look, "I should fix my Death Star!"

He whirled around and hurried toward a door that probably led to some kind of parallel universe, phaser guns totally forgotten on the table, and Damon's mouth quirked with something suspiciously close to endearment. "You fix your Death Star and I'll fix mine."

"Deal!" Kai sang before disappearing into the dark room.

It took him a second to work up the whatever—nerve? Composure? Physical control of his legs?—to head over to the kitchen. Bonnie was standing in front of the sink with her back to him, curly hair gathered on top of her head with a pen, the sleeves of her dress pushed halfway up her arms in a scrunch of burgundy velvet. His stare traced over the oval of warm, brown skin her dress's plunging back left bare, skin he'd been finding every excuse to run his fingers over just a few hours ago.

Now all he saw was that the muscles beneath it were tensed.

He walked up behind her and wordlessly intercepted a plate just as she made to set it down on the drying rack, swiping up a clean dish towel with his other hand. He settled in next to her and dried the plate before putting it away in the cabinet above them. She didn't so much as glance at him.

This went on for a few tense minutes, until:

"You missed a spot."

Bonnie slid a sharp, humorless stare to his profile.

"Right in the middle." He held the plate up in front of his chest to show her. "See?" He glanced down over the edge. "Still pretty soapy—"

A harsh spray of water cut him off from the pull-out faucet she'd shot straight at him, dousing the plate, and he sputtered under the sudden onslaught, hand shooting up to block his eyes.

"Got it."

He wiped a slow hand over his newly sopping features. "Great."

She resumed her ignoring routine, plucking up another dish to wash, and he glanced down at himself: the entire top half of him was soaked through. He pushed back the thick swathe of hair sticking to his forehead with a look caught somewhere between resignation and appreciation.

She was not going to make this easy.

He set the dripping plate down on the counter. "Think we can talk?"

She shrugged as she scrubbed down a serving dish. "We're talking right now."

"Bon."

"What did I say about calling me that?"

"Bonnie," he corrected, his voice a little more earnest, and she ignored him for a studious beat before sighing and abandoning the plate in the sink. She whirled around and dried her hands against her apron before folding her arms across her chest, leaning against the counter with a dark look.

"What?"

He took her in for a second. She had soap suds on her cheek. Her apron said 'Licensed to Grill'. Her eyelashes were ridiculously curly. He realized he didn't know what to say. "Are you aware that you only have one earring on?"

She immediately made to turn back around and he surged forward and caught her by the elbow.

"Look, I'm sorry for what I said to you earlier."

She slowed to a tentative halt. His throat felt a little thicker than normal and he cleared it.

"You were right. It was shitty and I was just trying to get under your skin, which is stupid because you didn't do anything wrong. Honestly, I..." he shook his head, averting his stare briefly, "I probably should've thanked you, but instead I, you know, got all defensive and brought up something that hurt you and yeah, I just—" he shook his head again, realizing the more he was talking about it that there really wasn't any way to explain himself. It was just pure shittiness.

"Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I'm sorry." He reached up to rub the back of his neck awkwardly. "And I appreciate what you did for me." His brows drew in after a beat. "And that what I said wasn't true. You're not some fake good person. A fake good person wouldn't follow a stranger out into the snow when they're flipping out or wake up from a bender more worried about her friends than herself." His stare lifted back up to hers. "Or refuse to leave during a panic attack that would've made most people book it the hell out of the room."

Her stare was quiet and deliberating on his and he shrugged.

"Your instinct is kindness, kid. And it's okay if you don't want to forgive me or even talk to me, but it's not okay if anything I said makes you believe that any less."

A quiet beat passed. He felt his tendons tense a bit, fidgety, eager to move.

"Sorry for calling you kid."

She blinked at him.

"Forgot I wasn't allowed to use that one, either."

He really didn't do well with this kind of stuff.

"That was for when I was a… what was it?"

The mumble of her voice surprised him. "Tolerable asshole."

"Right." He drummed his fingers against his side. "As opposed to a glaring one."

"And immature."

His lips flickered at her tone. It was cool, but it had a small, familiar bite of her sass to it. "Right."

"And inconsiderate."

"Yeah."

"And mean."

She slowly eased back against the counter, and he didn't know what to make of the sheer volume of relief coursing through him. "Very mean."

"Very, _very_ mean," she insisted, and his lips flickered in a quietly apologetic look.

"I'm sorry."

She eyed him for a long beat before dropping her gaze and lapsing into a sigh. "Damon, I know much it sucks to feel exposed and vulnerable."

His eyes fell to the dead space between them. "It wasn't just that." He felt her skepticism before he could even see it and he cleared his throat. "I mean, that was part of it, but I'm not normally this—I mean, I can usually…" he struggled for the words for a beat before sighing and lifting a hand to his hair—it was cold and wet against his fingers. "I just had a really shitty week last week."

The bite of Chicago flared sharp in his memory. The rumble of the L. The echoing voices in the courthouse. Eyes everywhere—judge eyes, lawyer eyes, her eyes.

"And it brought up a lot of old, stupid stuff that I shouldn't even care about anymore but for some reason do, so I'm just," he pressed his lips together, forcing his stare back up to hers, "I'm just not the most well-adjusted right now."

He offered her a sardonic smile that didn't reach his eyes.

She eyed him for a probing beat. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not even a little bit."

She nodded at the decisive response, glancing down at her hands. "Well," she ventured after a few seconds, "for what it's worth, I forgive you."

He felt the curl of his mouth grow more genuine.

"Largely because staying mad takes effort." Her stare had a glint when it swung back up to his. "And I'm tired."

"Works for me."

"Don't do that again, Damon."

His gaze sobered a bit at the sincerity in her voice. "I won't."

"And if you think I'm overstepping or making you uncomfortable, don't bite my head off, just tell me."

"Okay."

"And don't stop calling me kid."

His brows ticked up at the unexpected request.

She shrugged. "It's cute and I like it."

His lips flickered up. "You got it, kid."

"Good."

She held his gaze with a stubborn look before slipping into a small smile, the corners of her eyes crinkling a bit, and he was struck by the most bizarre impulse to kiss her. Not like press-her-into-the-counter kiss her, or lift-her-onto-the-table kiss her, but just kiss her. Light. Simple. A tactile affirmation that they were all good, like they were some bickery married couple in a movie.

It baffled the hell out of him, since he was pretty sure he'd never kissed anyone that way in his entire life, but thankfully, the lights flickering overhead distracted him before he could think too much about it.

A very Kai-like giggle sounded from across the apartment.

"Ignore that, friends!"

He shot Bonnie a thoughtful look. "There's a really big chance I left him building a death ray."

She quirked a brow. "You mean on top of his liquefaction ray and his shrink ray?"

"You know what they say: greatness comes in trifectas."

"No one says that."

"People say that."

"Who's people?"

"Me."

"Contrary to what the size of your ego would indicate, you're actually only one person."

"I'm sure I could get Kai to say it, too."

"You mean your new BFF?"

"Do you think Stefan's going to be jealous?"

"He'll survive."

"Yeah," his stare took on a sly gleam as he glanced in the direction of the other apartment, "he's got plenty to distract him."

"Speaking of Kai," she ventured, and his gaze snagged on the way she was looking at him. Her eyes had warmed a bit. His shoulders instinctively tensed. "That was nice, what you did for him earlier."

He knew what she was talking about but decided to play dumb anyway. "What?"

"The way you handled the crossbow thing. It was sweet."

He shrugged. "Not a big deal."

"Mm." She scrunched her nose. "Kind of a big deal."

"How was that a big deal?"

"Because I don't think a lot of people in his life have given him the respect of treating him like a normal person," she replied, shrugging lightly. "Myself included."

"Think that says more about the world than me," he snorted, and something in her face gathered a bit, like she had more to say but was trying to hold it in. He blinked at her. "What?"

She bit her lip. "Nothing."

His stare flattened. "Kid, _what_?"

"Why do you do that?"

His brows knitted. "Do what?"

"Diminish yourself," she replied, a little exasperated. "Diminish your actions, diminish your, you know, goodness."

"My 'goodness'?"

"Yeah," she said, "you downplay anything nice you do. You downplayed what you did for me last night, you're downplaying what you did for Kai, and if I brought up the way you got between me and that crossbow without even blinking earlier, you'd probably downplay that, too," she said, crossing her arms. "Like I know you're all convinced the world's this awful place and you're just normal, but have you ever considered that maybe the world's a normal place and you're just a lot better of a person than you give yourself credit for?"

His eyes brightened with amusement. "Are you saying I'm humble?"

"I'm saying I'm not the only 'instinctively kind' person in this kitchen."

He merely eyed her for a beat. The words settled strangely in his stomach. Buzzy. Unfamiliar. "I mean," he ventured, "I guess you could consider the gamma oven sentient."

She blinked at him. "I'm not kidding."

His eyes veered ceiling-ward—she was going all Pixar on him again. "Look, Bon," he began, voice dry and tired, "it's a nice thought, and I can kind of see why it might look that way to you, but trust me," he lapsed into a humorless chuckle, "if you knew half the shit I've done—"

"I didn't have the life you did," she interjected firmly, and his mouth fell into a resigned line—there she went again. "I mean, it wasn't the greatest, but it wasn't yours. And in general, I'm considered a pretty empathetic person—caring about people is kind of my job," she continued, and he briefly wondered where she was going with this. "And despite both of those things going for me, I wasn't the one who made the guy dancing around his apocalypse lab right now feel valued and great about himself tonight. You did."

He glanced at the floor with a wry look—bingo.

"And that speaks highly of anyone," she pressed, "but particularly someone whose life seems like an assembly line of experiences tailor-made to suck the empathy right out of him."

His stare flicked back to hers, smug expression snagging a bit. He didn't know why. Something about the words just—he swallowed briefly.

"I know I literally just told you to stop me when I'm overstepping but I don't care—I was drunk when I said this the first time so I'm going to say it again: you're more than you think you are." Her eyes were calmly certain. "And it's not dependent on anything. Not your past, not your future—you _are_ more. Right now. Present-tense. I'm looking right at it. So really, the only thing you have to do is see it for yourself."

He wasn't sure what to say. His blood felt weirdly charged, like it was mixed with electricity, and it made his entire body feel on-edge. He didn't know what to do with the feeling so he cleared his throat. "Is the pep rally over?"

She stared him for a considering beat before shrugging. "To be continued."

"Great."

"But only because Kai just got really quiet and I'm not sure he's still in this dimension."

"Mm."

"So I'm going to go check on him," she said, shrugging her apron off and setting it on the counter. "And then more pep."

His lips took on a sarcastic tilt. "Looking forward to it."

She shot him a breezy look as she set off for the door, though about halfway through she turned around and started pumping her fists in the air, moving backwards in loose, loping steps. "Damon, Damon, he's our man, if he can't do it no one can, goooooooo Damon!"

"Wow."

"Just thought I'd give you a preview."

"It's really something."

"I was actually a cheerleader for a bit in college."

"I can see why it didn't work out."

"I still have the uniform."

His dry expression grew interested. "Really?"

"But it's a little too small now."

"This keeps improving."

She rolled her eyes as she reached the doorway and slipped into the hall, waving a blind hand over shoulder. "Try not to do anything secretly heroic while I'm gone."

His stare flattened as he watched her disappear from view.

 _Heroic_.

He snorted—he hadn't been called that since he was a kid. 'Heroic Ten-Year-Old Turns In Murderous Parents'. It was wrong even then. An abused ten year old turned in his murderous parents. A terrified ten year old turned in his murderous parents. There was nothing heroic about it. It wasn't to save anyone else. It was to save himself.

He turned back to the sink to finish up what was left of the dishes.

His blood was still weirdly electric in his veins, the feeling uncomfortable and invasive, and he shook his arms out a bit to try and cast it off.

He felt restless. Edgy.

Had he taken something? Was there something in the food? It felt like some kind of druggy reaction.

His lip curled—maybe he was allergic to pep.

He flipped the faucet on and glanced down at his still soaked shirt, the same one she'd spilled champagne on earlier, the one that his dry cleaner was going to give him an 'are you kidding me?' look when he handed it over in a wrinkled mess, and his lips couldn't help but quirk.

Maybe he was high on it.

* * *

An hour, four love polygons, two three-way calls, and three restored friendships later, Caroline finally handed the phone back over to Stefan.

"Marry her," came the immediate greeting from the other end of the line, blunt and dramatic, and his lips couldn't help but twitch.

"Hey, Smalls."

"I'm so serious, Stefan," Rebekah said. "Marry her. Marry her and I'll forgive you for every boring girlfriend you've ever put me through."

He shook his head, marveling at her ability to make even his girlfriends about herself. He chanced a glance at Caroline—she was heading toward the kitchen to get more tea, gathering her hair into a thick bun atop her head, and not for the first time over the past hour, he was struck by how unbothered she looked. Loose. Relaxed. As if she hadn't just spent an unwanted hour talking a virtual stranger through detailed and highly dramatic personal problems that had nothing to do with her.

"Do you want any tea?" she called as she reached the doorway, glancing over her shoulder, and maybe it was because Rebekah was practically planning their wedding in his ear, or maybe it was just the way she looked in her pajamas and slippers, hair falling into her face, casual and a little tired, like she'd just come back from a long day of work and was finally unwinding here, alone, with him, but for a split-second, he could see it.

The married thing.

New and easy, kids still a few years away, their lives a collage of Netflix nights and impromptu trips and weird recipes they only got halfway through before they ended up on the table instead.

"Stefan," she said, face furrowing at his lack of response, and he immediately snapped out of his thoughts.

"Yeah, sorry, I, uh," he cleared his throat, giving his head a baffled shake to clear it, "I'm good, thanks."

She arched an amused brow at his reaction before disappearing into the kitchen, and he flopped back against the couch with a sigh, scrubbing a hand over his face. Married. Jesus.

"She said she was Bonnie's roommate—is that all she is?" Rebekah demanded, still yammering about their alleged done deal of a relationship from the other end of the line, and his eyes flicked up to the ceiling. "Like are you guys friends at all?"

"Yeah, we're friends."

"Like good ones?"

He parted his mouth, unsure what to say.

"As in like, is there a possibility that something more could happen between you guys?"

"I—" he began before closing his mouth, feeling oddly warm. "I mean, I don't—"

" _Wait,"_ she cut in, honing in on his tone in her scary Rebekah way, "did something _already happen_!?"

He sighed tiredly. "Bekah—"

"Omigodomigodomigod—"

"It's not like that, we're just friends."

"Yeah, friends who've hooked up!"

He opened his mouth to deny it, but after a second, he realized that he hadn't actually had the chance to tell anyone about it yet. Not a single person. Damon had just figured it out. Bonnie was still totally in the dark. He dropped his gaze to his hands, lips flickering up at the corners. "Just a few times."

The shriek that came through the phone was loud enough to make Caroline stop in her tracks as she came back from the kitchen. "If she's having another crisis, it's going to have to wait till at least tomorrow," she joked, and he straightened against the couch.

"Uh, no, she's fine," he replied, voice taking on an edge as he lowered it. "Bekah, cut it out."

"I can't believe I actually like someone you're into!" Rebekah squealed, entirely ignoring him. "You guys are like a real life OTP! You need a ship name!"

He thumbed the call volume down on the side of his phone as Caroline sat down next to him, opting out of the armchair she'd been sprawled in before.

"I'm going to go now, Beks."

"What about like, 'Carefan'?"

"Tell everyone I love them."

"Or Stefaline?"

"I'll be home soon."

"Ooo, what about Stero—"

He hung up mid-word and dropped the phone to his lap, staring at it for a long beat. "So yeah," he said, lips flicking up in a mixture of exasperation and harassment, "that's my little sister."

"She's really something." He glanced over and saw Caroline smiling over the rim of her teacup.

His gaze softened a bit. "Hey, I didn't realize she'd keep you on the phone for an hour. I'm sorry about that," he said, shaking his head, "she usually doesn't latch onto new people so qui—"

"Stefan, please," she cut in, waving a hand, "she's sweet, it was fine."

He snorted. "Sweet's not usually the first word that comes to most people's minds, but yeah." A layer of endearment warmed his eyes as he glanced back down at his phone. "Yeah, she is." His stare flicked back up to hers after a beat. "Thanks for talking to her."

"No problem," she said, blowing on her tea to cool it. "Honestly, she kind of reminds me of me at that age, which is just," she lapsed into a chuckle and shook her head, "girl, good luck."

His brows drew in. She said it like it was a bad thing.

Her stare snagged on his expression after a second and she frowned. "But not like—" she waved a hand, backtracking a bit, "I don't mean she's going to have the same experiences as me or anything."

His face loosened as he realized what she was saying.

"Matt was—that wasn't like—"

He lifted a fending hand. "I didn't think you were—"

"That was like a perfect storm of circumstances," she explained, stare averting hastily. "She'll be fine. She's smarter than that."

He stared at her. Her gaze was fixed on her hands, thumbs quietly tracing the lines of her teacup. "I didn't think that was what you were saying," he said after a long beat. "And I also don't think it's a matter of smart or not."

She continued to stare at her hands, the room quiet around them, devoid of the crackly twitter of Rebekah's voice or the sighs of exasperation it elicited. Seconds passed. The steam curling from her cup petered into a wispy flicker.

And then, just as he was about to change the subject, she cleared her throat. "I think I need to talk about Matt."

His eyes lit with a faint layer of surprise as her own flicked up to his. They were soft but resolute.

"And I think you should probably tell me about Elena."

* * *

A/N: First thing's first, sorry for the absurd wait on this! Life's been a little cray, but in a good way (starting medical school in a month, wooo!). Second off, some of you already know this but I ended up having to split this chapter in half from what I originally intended because unsurprisingly, I have no self control and it got too long. Unfortunately, that means that (once again) a lot of the things I was writing toward aren't actually going to come in till the next chapter, and as a result, I'm a little nervous about how this comes across as a standalone. I know a lot of you who follow the tumblr/twitter were probably looking forward to teased scenes that didn't make it in, or that certain parts probably felt fillery because I meant to have a counterbalance for them at the end that isn't there, but hopefully it still delivers something on it own. I see it as a kind of 'things are shifting' chapter that will earn the bigger, more emotional beats coming up next. Speaking of what's next, a good chunk of the next chapter's already written, so I'll try to have that out ASAP! The gang's finally reuniting for what conceptually's one of my favorite parts of the whole fic so far, and there's just lots of fun stuff ahead. Fluff, realizations, tears, laughs, call-outs - it's all coming, I'm just trying to get it right. In the meantime, though, feedback means the world, so drop a line if you can and I'll love you forever ;) Thanks, guys!


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